Queens Spinal Cord Injury Attorney: What Steps to Take After Spinal Cord Injury in an Accident?
A spinal cord injury is a devastating and life-altering event that occurs when there is damage to the spinal cord, disrupting its ability to transmit signals between the brain and the rest of the body. In Queens, NYC, these injuries may sometimes result from another party’s negligence, wreaking havoc on the lives of the victims and their families. These kinds of injuries can lead to paralysis, loss of sensation, and a myriad of physical and emotional challenges.
The consequences extend beyond the individual, impacting family members who become caregivers and support systems. The financial burden of medical expenses, ongoing rehabilitation, and necessary lifestyle modifications further compounds the challenges. Navigating daily life becomes a formidable task, affecting the quality of life for the injured victim and altering the dynamics of their familial relationships.
Spinal Cord Injuries in NYC: Causes, Types, And Damages
It is estimated that about 250,000 individuals currently live with spinal cord injuries in the United States. As many as 12,000 new spinal cord injuries occur every year. A spinal cord injury is a trauma that results in permanent damage to the spinal cord. In general, traumatic spinal injuries result from either penetration or non-penetration injuries.
Is There a Cure For Spinal Cord Injury?
Each year, 17,500 people in the United States suffer from spinal cord injuries. This is 48 new injuries on a daily basis. Most of these people get injured in falls, auto accidents, sports-related accidents, and violence. Newly injured patients are generally aged 42.
Spinal Cord Personal Injury Claims in NYC: A Short Guide
A spinal cord injury (SCI) can have disastrous consequences for the victim of an accident. Even in the best of circumstances, it involves learning to walk, move, and breathe again on your own. In many cases, a spinal cord injury proves to be a catastrophic one, with low survival rates. The victim could face countless lifelong challenges in the aftermath of this life-changing event, including inferior muscle tone and infections of the respiratory tract.
Think You have a Claim? Allow us to Evaluate
Our personal injury lawyers have the knowledge and experience to help you determine the basis of your claims
Building a personal injury case can be tricky. The foundation upon which a case is built—the basis of your claims—is critical. It helps determine the nature of the evidence you need to gather, the stand you have to take in court, and guess the defenses. So it is imperative that you hire the services of an experienced personal injury lawyer who will analyze the details of the accident and determine the basis of your claims accurately.
We, at RMFW Law, have been practicing law in New York for over three generations. We have helped our clients receive millions of dollars in compensation by building and presenting fool-proof cases bolstered by irrefutable claims.
There are three common bases for building a personal injury case—negligence, intentional wrong, and strict liability.
Looking at the Impact of Spinal Injuries
In any type of injury case, there’s going to be complicated research. Along with the broad questions concerning the context of an accident and how it happened, every personal injury case is inherently complicated by the sophistication and elaborate architecture of the human anatomy. Before they even start to resolve a case based on third-party liability, injury lawyers need to understand certain physical facts about a case. Here are some of the common and fundamental issues that have to be addressed in a spinal injury case.
Source of Impact
One of the biggest questions concerns the source of an impact. The answer to this question is one that will have direct application to the responsibility of parties to provide compensation. Where did the impact come from? Was it from a flying object with a certain velocity? Was it from ‘body to body’ impact? Was it from the impact of a motor vehicle collision, and if so, what contributed to the velocity of the vehicle? Looking at these questions, you can see that professional injury attorneys have to break down an accident into its raw physics, and in such cases, they must do so with relatively little direct information about that accident. Like detectives, they don’t explore one of these scenarios on the scene as it happens. They do it after the fact with the information that’s available.
Broken Ribs and Spinal Injuries
Broken ribs and spinal injuries are two very different types of injuries, but they are two of the common elements of many kinds of personal injury cases. One of the major differences is that broken ribs are easier to assess and will typically manifest in consistent ways. Patients will know they have broken ribs because they will feel the localized pain associated with this injury. Spinal injuries can be much more abstract, however. Patients may not feel pain, although the underlying injury can lead to health conditions later on down the road.
Getting Quick and Impartial Medical Care
Disk Degeneration and Accident Trauma
A major problem with accident cases involving spinal injuries concerns the process of differentiating traumatic injury from other types of gradual wear and tear on the body that can have similar symptoms, manifest in similar ways and exacerbate one another. Experienced injury lawyers know that there’s always the challenge of identifying a cause-and-effect chain with respect to spinal health conditions and they look closely at whether a traumatic impact had a significant influence on such conditions.
The Difficulty With Diagnosing Cervical Pain From Degeneration and Injury
Spine-Health.com provides some clues as to the difficulty of directly diagnosing and treating traumatic impact of the spine. The article first discusses how certain parts of the spine can be damaged and cause cervical pain after traumatic impact. It goes into detail about these injuries, but also provides this disclaimer: “A full review of cervical fractures is beyond the scope of this article.” The article also discusses another clue with respect to the relationship of traumatic impact of the spine and natural aging conditions, stating “It should be noted that trauma to cervical vertebrae occurs less often than cervical pain and other symptoms resulting from changes that occur with aging, such as the development of bone spurs in the neck and cervical osteoarthritis.” The article then goes on to describe bone spurs and symptoms.
