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How Long After a Car Accident Can You Go to the Hospital?

Posted on March 22, 2022 in

If you or somebody you care about has been involved in a vehicle accident, it is important that you seek medical care as soon as possible. However, there are various reasons why some individuals do not seek medical care right after a crash occurs. Even if this is the case for your accident, we still encourage you to go to the hospital as soon as you realize you have sustained any injuries. Here, we want to discuss some of the complications that can occur if you put off going to the hospital after a car accident.

Seek Medical Treatment Immediately

Right after a car accident, it is crucial for any person involved to seek medical treatment right away. We understand that there are often no signs or symptoms of injuries right after our crash occurs, but this can be deceiving. With the adrenaline coursing through our bodies, even after what seems like a relatively minor accident, symptoms of some injuries may be masked, particularly if they are internal.

Seeking immediate medical care helps ensure that a doctor conducts an evaluation to look for any unseen injuries. This also helps to establish a strong link between the crash and any injuries you may have sustained, which is something the insurance carriers are going to want to see.

Go to the Hospital After any Symptoms Appear

It is not uncommon for individuals to choose not to go to the hospital or doctor right after a vehicle accident occurs. That is okay, but it could complicate your eventual settlement, particularly if injuries do appear in the hours or days following a crash.

Our best recommendation is for you to go to the doctor or hospital as soon as you start to notice any signs or symptoms that are out of the ordinary. If you notice any unexpected pain or experience any type of disorientation or confusion, you need to take this as a sign that there may be unseen vehicle accident injuries that you were initially unaware of. We encourage you, at this point, to either call 911 or have someone drive you to an emergency clinic or the local emergency room.

When you go to see a doctor after experiencing symptoms of injuries hours or days following a crash, you need to let the doctor know that you were recently in a vehicle accident so they can conduct an evaluation appropriately and notate this in their report.

Work With an Attorney

If you or somebody you care about has experienced delayed injuries after a vehicle accident, you need to work with an attorney who has experience handling these claims. A lawyer will obtain all of the evidence necessary to establish a link between your injuries and the vehicle accident. Your Denver car accident attorney will be the one to handle all communication and negotiation with aggressive insurance carriers to help ensure that you recover compensation for your losses. You should still be able to recover compensation for your medical bills, lost wages, property damage expenses, and pain and suffering losses, regardless of how quickly you sought medical treatment. Just expect that the claim will be harder if you do not seek treatment right away.