What Value Can a Medical Consultant Add?
Janet Little, MD, TIPC
Empowering professionals experiencing stress, overwhelm and burnout to stand in their POWER without sacrificing their health and well-being.
Over the years we have been asked repeatedly, “What value can you add to my cases?” Let’s take a look at a Personal Injury example – and you can decide if it is worth having a Medical Consultant take a look at your case in the early stages in your representation.
In a personal injury case, involving a low-speed impact, a young woman sustained a debilitating nerve injury. She was a restrained passenger in a rear end collision – with the offending vehicle being a full-sized semi-truck. Her symptoms were initially a “sore shoulder and neck.” Over time her symptoms progressed into a devastating case of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome.
As one would expect, the defense team opined that the impact occurred at a velocity too low to cause serious injury. Our consultant was able to find a plethora of medical literature from well-known authorities to unequivocally show causation. Articles included a landmark study showing that carnival bumper cars have enough velocity to elicit serious injury. Another article demonstrated the cascade effect that occurs in these types of injuries.
Clearly a “minor” injury in people with a genetic predisposition leads to devastating sequalae negating the common defense argument that the genetic deformity is the cause of a person’s pain not the semi-truck that rear ended them.
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Finally, another article from the medical literature demonstrated that the diagnosis of this malady is not simply a diagnosis made by EMG or any other test (as is claimed by some), rather a clinical diagnosis best made by a physician with vast experience with the problem. The diagnosis is best made by considering the history, physical exam, and finally radiological or neurological testing. These facts deflated the defense position that the patient did not truly have TOS because “the EMG was abnormal, but not enough so to cause symptoms as severe as those exhibited by this patient.”
The consistent feedback we’ve been getting for years is that by using our Medical Summary Reports attorneys are, in fact, settling cases for better value with less attorney time. Some attorneys ask us to write a Medical Summary Report for every case they take in.
If you have questions about this newsletter, send Optimal MD Medical-Legal Consulting an email: [email protected]