Should you get an MRI after an accident? Now, this is a question that many of our personal injury clients ask us after a car accident, motorcycle accident, slip and fall, regardless of the type of injury. An MRI always comes up in every case and really the question that our clients have is what exactly does an MRI do than an x-ray does not do, so they may have gone to the hospital after a car accident, for example, been checked out, had an x-ray, it came back negative and then they were released from the hospital with some instructions to follow up with some type of medical provider and so the client then comes into us and says, okay, yeah, there’s nothing wrong with me. Well, that’s not, that’s not actually where, that’s not normally true because you really cannot tell what has happened to your soft tissue, which are the Oregons and the other soft tissues, soft tissue structures out of your body unless you get a more sensitive test and that’s called an MRI.
An MRI will normally, it can normally be prescribed by really any treating physician, a chiropractor, physical therapists, you name it, they can prescribe you an MRI and it’s usually done at least two weeks, if not several weeks after the accident. And that the reason why there’s a bit of a delay is that they want to wait for the swelling to go down so that they can get a more accurate picture. So an MRI stands for a magnetic resonance imaging. And as I mentioned before, it is a more detailed, uh, better diagnostic tests to determine whether there are any soft tissue damage. And most frequently it’s to your spine. So say for example, after a car accident, your neck hurts, you get an x-ray, it’s negative. Well it continues to hurt. So your doctor then sends you off for an MRI of the neck to determine whether, of course if there’s any soft tissue damage.
And Lo and behold, when you get the results back, you find either bulging or disc herniations and those are just simply results that you would have never found on an x-ray. And you can have an MRI done really on any injured part of your body. As long as there’s some type of correlation to the injury, your doctor will likely send you off for an MRI to that part of the body. And at the end of the day, that’s what the insurance companies are looking for, is some type of diagnostic positive injury relating to the accident which you sustained, and then that equates to a certain amount of value on your case. So hopefully that answers the question about the importance, or should you get an MRI after an accident?
*The above has been transcribed by a third party service and has not been checked for accuracy.
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