What is Maximum Medical Improvement?
If you have been injured in a car accident, you are probably in the process of recovering from your injuries. Immediately after your accident when you were seen by a doctor, your doctor may have assessed your injuries, made a plan for how they would be treated, and informed you about what you could expect throughout your recovery, including how long it would take. If you are not expected to make a full recovery all of your injuries, it is important that you become familiar with the concept of maximum medical improvement, or MMI.
While some automobile accident victims are fortunate enough to recover fully from the injuries that they sustained in their accidents, others are, unfortunately, not so lucky. Eventually, a person who will not be able to recover fully from their injuries reaches a point in their treatment where their doctors feel as though they will not make any further improvement. This point is referred to as maximum medical improvement, or “MMI”.
When an injured person reached MMI, they are not always finished with treatment. Ongoing care may be necessary in order to maintain the progress that they have made. For example, a person whose back was injured in a car accident may have lingering back pain, even after surgery relieves the severe pain and restricted movement that the person experienced immediately after the accident. If the person’s doctor knows that an additional surgery would not resolve the lingering pain, they may declare her to have achieved maximum medical improvement and create a plan for her to manage the ongoing pain through stretching exercises and medication.
If you are injured and you are not expected to make a complete recovery, it is important that you continue your treatment until you reach MMI and that you engage in any ongoing treatment which is required to maintain the state of health that you have been able to achieve. One of the reasons that you want to make sure that you reach MMI is, of course, that you want to be as healthy as you possibly can. The other reason to follow your treatment plan carefully and reach MMI is so that your attorney can accurately calculate the future damages that you will suffer as the result of the permanent nature of your injuries. The costs of lost wages, ongoing treatment, and pain and suffering can really add up, if you calculate them out over your expected life span, and settling your case before you achieve MMI may cause you to recover less than you should, based upon what your injuries are likely to cost you in the future.
It can be frustrating to wait until you are at MMI before thinking about settling your Tennessee Automobile Accident Case, especially with the insurance company calling you and bugging you about it all the time. A Memphis Auto Accident Attorney can take over the task of communicating with the insurance company and help you to pursue an appropriate award of damages once you have recovered as much as your doctor thinks that you will. The skilled Tennessee Automobile Accident Attorneys at Bailey & Greer, PLLC offer top quality legal assistance to automobile accident victims and their families. To learn more about how we can help you, please call us at (888) 470-9143 to schedule a time to discuss your case. At Bailey & Greer, PLLC, we are small enough to care, big enough to fight, and experienced enough to win.