The insurance industry loves to do two types of claims, you’re either soft tissue or you’re surgical. You either have a zipper scar, or you don’t.
Soft tissue injuries are muscles, ligaments, tendons. You sit on tack, that’s a soft tissue injury. You have a heart attack, that’s a soft tissue. The tissue has been injured.
Versus surgical, I’ve cut you open anatomically and looked at your neck and did whatever I’m going to do.
Insurance companies tend to downgrade soft tissues as non-believable. That’s why important, if you get the doctor on the claim early, you get MRIs and you go through it.
Surgical cases take you into a different level. They clearly have more value because the second I say to a client “Would you please show the jury your zipper scar”, they feel it.
And as a lawyer on the soft tissue claim, I’ve got to teach him that they feel as bad as the problem with the surgery by the disc is blown on the MRI, “Look at this CAT scan, it’s touching the spinal cord, that’s why his leg hurts.”
That’s the difference in the way the insurance company here the surgical or not.
But nonsurgical cases can be just as valuable as surgical cases if they’re worked out right from the beginning, diagnosed correctly from the beginning, the doctor saying “this is a problem” instead of, “I think here’s the x-ray, MRI, CAT scan”, some tool to show a picture, which I always say is worth a 1,000 words.
