What Is The Lawsuit Value Of Herniated Disc
A New York City Car Accident Lawyer Explains
What is the personal injury lawsuit value for a herniated disc ?
Clients often ask, how much is a herniated disc worth after a car accident case? Well, it really depends on the type of injury that you sustain and the type of medical treatment that you end up getting and the way that the case progresses. In New York, a herniated disc can be worth just five thousand or ten thousand dollars.
How much is a soft tissue injury case with little medical care worth ?
If, for example, you as a client sustain a herniation after a car accident and you go to a physical therapy office and you happen to have an MRI and MRI just says that you have a herniated disc, but you don’t do anything else, you don’t see a specialist. You don’t end up having surgery. You don’t end up having any kind of pain management procedures. And you just leave it at that. You go once or twice a week to have chiropractic adjustments to have a massage. And if you leave it at that. After three months of treatment, the medical records can be sent to the insurance company and the case can be settled probably in the range of 5000 to 10000, maybe 15 or 20, depending on the insurance company, depending on the venue for the lawsuit. And factors like that.
So what’s the value if pain management injections are needed ?
Now, if you take it the next step. If you have a herniation and it’s very painful and you need to see further treatment with specialists and more medical care and you end up doing something known as pain management, there are usually two types of pain management. First, sometimes people do what are called pain relief injections or epidural steroid injections. And that procedure would probably make the case worth more in the range of anywhere from thirty thousand up to fifty thousand.
We even had one case go for over a hundred thousand just with those pain relief injections. But the problem that we saw with the pain relief injections is that they’re temporary. Right. They’re like taking a Tylenol for a headache. So you do a pain relief injection and your pain goes down for maybe a month or two. But then when the medicine wears off, the pain comes back. And now because you have that herniated disc with the disc having exploded and the liquid inside the disc leaking and touching a nerve root, that’s causing a lot of pain.
How much is a micro-discectomy or perc disc procedure worth ?
And so because of that, you need to seek out more medical care. And so the next step after the epidural steroid injection is usually seeing a pain management doctor as well. And they do what’s known as a micro discectomy or a percutaneous discectomy. And there they go in with Stryker de compressor and a decompresses the disk. And it actually removes some of the disk material. It removes the leak from the disk. The part that’s leaking out of this, touching the nerve roots, which is causing the pain, gets removed through the decompresser machine.
It’s usually a minimally invasive procedure, although it is a surgery and it’s done in the office or in a surgery center. With that procedure, a case is now worth even more. We’ve settled cases with a percutaneous discectomy for one hundred seventy five thousand. We settle them for two hundred twenty five thousand. We’ve even had verdicts in Brooklyn for three hundred and fifty thousand. And recently we had a verdict in Manhattan for five hundred and forty seven thousand for a percutaneous discectomy case.So they run the gamut, but you can get much more.
What if I end up needing a full blown fusion surgery ?
Now, the next step, if the percutaneous doesn’t help you because the injury is so severe, would be having a full blown spinal surgery with an orthopedic spinal surgeon or a board certified neuro spinal surgeon and that kind of surgery known as a spinal fusion or a laminectomy or a discectomy, a full-blown one, that would probably command even more compensation. That would probably be in the range of seven hundred fifty thousand, a million, even up to two or three million.
We had one case with a construction accident worker who had a spinal fusion where it was settled for two million eight hundred thousand dollars. We had another case with a truck driver up in the Bronx in a trucking accident that was settled for two and a half million dollars. And the reason those command more money is because now you have a serious spinal fusion. But also the doctor will write a report saying that the client will have future medical expenses. For example, the cost of physical therapy, the cost of further surgeries, one major spinal fusion surgery could run fifty thousand, seventy five thousand or even more just as the cost of the surgery.
What other types of compensation can an injured person recover ?
Furthermore, a lot of these clients will have lost wages. Now an economist will come in and give an expert a prediction as to future lost wages. And so you have economic damages. You also have the pain and suffering, which is greater because these people have had a significant and permanent back injury. So those cases are worth much more. But in determining how much you can get for a herniated disc, usually, you have to look at, obviously, the liability, how the accident happened.
Conclusion
The damages which we talked about now either soft tissue with physical therapy, pain management or surgical intervention with spinal fusion and the venue where the case is pending and how the case is worked up. If the case is worked up properly, if the case is litigated aggressively and efficiently, which we always strive to do for our clients. And those are the factors that usually determine how much a herniated disc is worth in New York City.