Therapy is an expensive cost after a serious injury. If you were involved in a car accident or another accident, you may be left with physical injuries that require physical therapy and mental/emotional harm that requires mental health therapy. These costs are recoverable in many cases, but you need to have the right evidence.
You can recover the cost of mental health and physical health care alike after an accident, which includes not only the immediate treatments, but also ongoing care like therapy. These costs need to be proven, meaning you need copies of bills, receipts, and other records of their cost. You also need to connect the therapy costs to the accident, which is often simpler with physical therapy.
For a free case evaluation, call the Chicago personal injury attorneys at Rhatigan Law Offices at (312) 578-8502.
Connecting Physical and Mental Health Therapy Costs to Your Accident
You can recover the cost of medical treatment after an accident. This includes both the cost of physical health care, like surgeries and casts, as well as mental health care. However, our Chicago personal injury lawyers will need evidence like medical and mental health records to connect these treatments to your accident and show that they were reasonable costs.
Physical Therapy
Many injuries require physical therapy. As long as you have a doctor or other professional prescribing physical therapy to treat your injury, that is probably enough to prove it was necessary and reasonable.
It is also simple enough to connect this to your accident because the injuries were not there before the accident, and the therapy is for the same injuries you had treated immediately after the accident.
The defense will often try to draw a line at preexisting injuries and exclude them from coverage. If they cannot find records and evidence that your injury was from before the accident, these defenses will probably fail.
Mental Health Therapy
Proving that your mental health therapy is connected to the accident might be slightly more complex. In the same way you need to prove physical therapy is for injuries from the accident, you need to show there are no mental health records showing preexisting issues.
If you face PTSD symptoms after an accident, depression after a serious injury, or anxiety that you will be in another accident – and you did not face these symptoms before the accident – that will be good evidence these conditions were from this accident.
Similar to physical therapy, if you get a recommendation from your doctor to seek out mental health therapy, that is often enough to connect this to your injury as a reasonable medical cost.
What Physical Therapy Can Be Covered?
Reasonable medical costs can be covered, and physical therapy is often an essential part of your medical care after an injury. What physical therapy you receive, how many sessions, and how long you continue with the therapy will all depend on your specific injury and assessments from doctors and physical therapists.
Often, physical therapy focuses on the following goals:
- Restoring normal range of motion and flexibility after an injury
- Restrengthening an injured area
- Helping you heal faster
- Getting you back to normal daily activities or job tasks
- Preventing reinjury as you get back to normal.
A physical therapist might manually manipulate your joints and muscles to help you move and restore motion, gait, and function. They may also recommend many exercises or stretches that you can do on your own, and following through with this treatment will be an important part of actually completing your physical therapy and getting the full benefit of treatments.
Is Physical Rehabilitation the Same as Physical Therapy?
Physical rehabilitation refers to the entire realm of treatments to get you back to full functioning after an accident. This can include physical therapy as part of your rehabilitation, but it may also include things like occupational therapy. That focuses on restoring certain skills, like eating, dressing yourself, or getting around your house safely after a serious, disabling injury.
Often, physical therapy is part of your physical rehabilitation, along with other care. While these terms are often interchangeable to the average person, the people who perform physical therapy and rehab services might have more to say about the distinction.
In a legal sense, these are all compensable damages under the umbrella of “medical bills,” regardless of what specific name you use.
What Mental Health Therapy Can Be Covered?
Mental health therapy for an accident can be used in two main ways:
- Treating the mental and emotional effects of the injury itself
- Treating newly formed mental health issues brought on by the injury.
For example, if your injury has left you in severe shock and with plenty of anxiety, you might seek out mental health therapy to get back to “normal.” Others might be left with ongoing symptoms, such as diagnosable depression after an amputation or PTSD from a dangerous car crash.
Whichever goal of treatment you face, you can get coverage because the therapy is treating the effects of your injury.
Mental health therapy can come in many forms, and whichever treatments are reasonably needed to treat your conditions should be covered. The most common form of therapy is talk therapy, where you sit with a counselor or therapist and discuss techniques to cope with problems and anxieties. Some may employ advanced techniques like EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), which can be particularly effective in treating trauma.
Some injury victims might even need intensive care, such as inpatient mental health treatment.
Is Psychiatric Care Covered?
Psychiatrists, as opposed to therapists or psychologists, are medical doctors. This means they can prescribe medication, which is often a core part of psychiatric care.
Like any other physical or mental health care, psychiatric care can be incredibly useful and quite reasonable after an accident. As such, it should be covered, too.
Getting a prescription for anti-anxiety medication is incredibly common after a serious, distressing accident. It is also common for people experiencing PTSD symptoms, depression, or other mental health disorders after a serious accident to need medication and psychiatric treatment.
Call Our Chicago Personal Injury Lawyers Today
For help getting your damages paid, call the Peoria, IL personal injury attorneys at Rhatigan Law Offices at (312) 578-8502.
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