Common Damages in Cases Involving Chronic Pain
August 22nd, 2022
|Suffering from chronic pain caused by an accident can reduce your quality of life and leave you with long-lasting financial consequences. 20.4% of U.S. adults suffer from chronic pain, which leads to the inability to work or enjoy everyday activities.
You have the right to seek compensation if you suffer chronic pain due to a personal injury accident like a slip-and-fall, car collision, or motorcycle accident. However, chronic pain is considered non-economic damage, which can be harder to prove than measurable economic damages.
By working with a skilled personal injury attorney from Berg Injury Lawyers, you can seek maximum compensation for your injuries, including chronic pain’s lasting financial, physical, and emotional consequences.
What is Chronic Pain?
Chronic pain is continuous pain that lasts for more than three months. This pain can be constant or intermittent and last for years after an initial injury. Chronic pain can happen anywhere in the body. Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults experience chronic pain.
Chronic pain interferes with daily life, the ability to work, eat, participate in physical or social activities, perform self-care, or care for others can be affected. Chronic pain can lead to depression, anxiety, and sleep problems, making the pain worse. This creates a cycle that is difficult to break. Chronic pain is a significant medical condition that can require life-long treatment.
Examples of chronic pain include:
- Arthritis/joint pain
- Back pain
- Fibromyalgia, or “all-over” muscle pain
- Headaches and migraines
- Neck pain
- Nerve damage
- Pain resulting from injuries, medical conditions, or surgery
Chronic pain can result from health conditions, but it can also result from accident injuries. For example, a slip-and-fall can cause you to experience back or spinal cord injuries that result in chronic lower back pain. Also, whiplash in a car accident can leave you with life-long chronic neck and shoulder pain and headaches.
Non-Economic Damages for Chronic Pain
When you file a personal injury lawsuit to seek damages, your lawyer will likely ask for economic and non-economic damages. Economic damages are the easiest to recover because they are factual, such as objective totals gathered from medical bills, lost wages, and other calculated expenses.
Non-economic damages are harder to prove and quantify. They refer to damages you can receive for issues like pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of enjoyment of life. Chronic pain is considered non-economic damage, making it difficult to prove during a trial case.
At trial, you and your legal team must explain your pain and its effects. You must prove your claims with evidence, and a judge or jury must subjectively place a value on your claims.
Winning Non-Economic Damages
Proving subjective information is a difficult legal task and is best handled by a professional personal injury lawyer. Your attorney can prove subjective information by using medical records, photographs, videos, testimony, and other methods to convey how your life has been and will continue to be affected by chronic pain’s physical and emotional consequences.
An experienced lawyer from Berg Injury Lawyers can help you seek damages for all current and future medical treatment, income loss, pain and suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life. In some cases, your lawyer can also pursue punitive damages to hold negligent parties responsible for their actions.
How a Personal Injury Lawyer Can Help
Hiring a lawyer can help maximize your compensation so you get the settlement you need for your injury and chronic pain.
Having legal representation before you answer questions from an employer, medical facility, or insurance company ensures you won’t say anything that can later be held against you.
Most claims are resolved at the negotiation stage with an insurance company; however, the negligent party’s insurance company may not offer you a fair settlement. If this happens, your lawyer can take the case to court, calling on expert witnesses to convince jurors that you deserve fair compensation.
Your lawyer can help you navigate California’s pure comparative fault doctrine, which awards damages based on the percentage of fault. Your lawyer will seek to prove the other party was 100% at fault for your injuries and resulting chronic pain. This maximizes your compensation and wins you damages to cover medical bills, lost income, and additional costs associated with treating and managing your pain.
Get a Free Consultation
If you suffer from chronic pain, you deserve compensation. Berg Injury Lawyers have been helping Northern California citizens get fair personal injury compensation since 1981.
Our Sacramento personal injury lawyers are experienced, skilled, and won’t back down, even with the most aggressive pushback. We know you are entitled to more than the insurance companies will offer, and we know how to help you fight to get it.
We have over 40 years of experience handling personal injury cases. Our attorneys know how to get you the best possible results and settle as quickly as possible. Get the compensation you deserve by contacting our personal injury lawyers today.