How Will You Prove Your Pain And Suffering In Court?
One of the biggest parts of a personal injury case is proving your injury. After all, what is the point of showing someone else is negligent, and thus responsible for your injury, if you can’t show how injured you really are?
It may sound difficult to show the extent of your injury to a neutral panel of jurors. They have not lived in your shoes for the past months or years, and thus, you are trying to impart on them something they cannot see, feel, and likely have never lived through themselves. But there is an art to showing a jury how injured you are, and a good Tennessee personal injury attorney knows how to do this for you.
Medical Records
Your medical records can go a long way to showing just how injured that you are. Medical records tell the story of the severity of your injury, and the treatment and possibly procedures that you have gone through to try to get better.
You can get pain and suffering not just for your injury, but also for the process of healing—for example, for the anxiety, discomfort, pain and disability that someone may feel after a major surgery, or side effects from a medication you need to get better.
This is why it is so important to get the medical help that you need after an accident. It is hard to show how injured you are, when there are very few medical records showing what your treatment actually was, or that you actually were in enough pain to get treatment.
Your Testimony, and Your Friends and Family
Your own testimony will also count. Yes, you are obviously a biased witness, with something to gain by saying how much pain you are or were in.
But that’s OK—most juries will take truthful, heartfelt testimony into account. Nobody knows what you have been through better than you do. Your words and description of your experiences have meaning, and they can be very persuasive for a jury to hear.
Just as your testimony is powerful, so is that of your friends and family—anybody who is with you enough to see what you have been going through, or who can talk about the difficulties you have had since the accident.
Your Doctors
Your doctors often will also testify. They won’t just testify about straight medical facts about your treatment but also about how you presented to them, and how you looked and felt whenever you went for a doctor’s visit.
Your doctor knows how much pain a broken bone causes, or how much pain a given type of surgery causes. Your doctor can tell the jury how painful a given injury can be, and while this isn’t as persuasive as your own testimony, it can give credibility to the things you’ve told the jury about your pain.
Worried about how you’ll prove your personal injury case? We can help. Call the Maryville personal injury attorneys at Fox Willis Burnette, PLLC, today.
