There are several treatments that most family physicians recommend to their patients when they have suffered a whiplash injury due to a motor vehicle accident. In my experience, most family physicians will recommend physiotherapy, massage therapy, acupuncture or to see a chiropractor, each of these health professionals are trained to rehabilitate and treat your whiplash injury. Family physicians may also recommend a combination of therapies together that may supplement each other during your treatment process. Many physicians may also recommend you try non-traditional therapies such as acupressure and traditional Chinese treatments. It is pivotal that you follow the advice of your physician when beginning a treatment process, one of the most damaging things you can do to your case is to go against the recommendations of your family doctor and try treatments or medications that the doctor does not recommend. It is a guarantee that ICBC will eventually view your medical records and correlate your doctor’s notes to the therapies that you have engaged in. It is damaging to your case when you blatantly go against the wishes of your family doctor.
Most patients spend a great deal of money on rehabilitation; treatments such as physiotherapy and chiropractic work are expensive and patients in most cases are reimbursed by ICBC during settlement. However, ICBC may not pay for treatments that they consider not to be recommended by the family physician; therefore, it is important that you speak with your family doctor before engaging in a therapy and paying for it out of your own pocket. If your doctor does not recommend the therapy, ICBC may not reimburse you. Also, I have had many clients that continuously go to therapy sessions even though their family doctor has told to stop going after a certain amount of sessions or extend sessions past what was recommended, in these types of situations ICBC may not pay for the sessions they feel were not warranted.
We must remind ourselves that the treatment received after a motor vehicle accident is to rehabilitate a patient so they can continue their lives without the injuries they received during their accident. It is your doctor’s objective to send you to treatments they feel will work for you, if they feel a certain amount of sessions will work than it is your responsibility to fulfil those sessions before trying a new source of rehabilitation.
If your injury persists, you should see your lawyer or family physician and they may have suggestions that can help with your rehabilitation or other types of treatments that may work for you. Each person’s injury will react differently to different treatments, it is important that a patient contacts their doctor on a regular basis to offer their views on how a treatment is affecting them and what other treatments may be beneficial to helping them in the future. You may also speak to your lawyer and get their thoughts on treatments that have worked for their other clients, we have many clients who have tried a laundry list of traditional and non-traditional therapies for their injuries, these suggestions can be taken back to your doctor for further explanation and to find out whether that source of treatment is correct for you. Persisting injuries such as whiplash take a holistic approach to heal, like I’ve stated before it’s usually a combination of treatments that will help the injury.
If you have been in a car accident and need free advice, please feel free to call your local personal injury lawyer, Anoop S. Bains, at 604-503-4733.
