Why It’s Important to Choose a Doctor Who Will Advocate For You

Another reason you want to make sure you pick the right doctor is that not all doctors are patient advocates. In fact, some doctors, when they find out you were hurt in some type of collision or other accident, can be downright suspicious of you. A good example is a doctor that was in the Cincinnati area who’s an orthopedic doctor, and he was treating someone for an injury to the wrist or hand—I forget which exactly—that was going to require surgery. The insurance adjuster in that case took the step of getting video footage of the injured person walking around the area before the injury occurred and sending it to the doctor with the adjuster’s, you know, speculation about what must have actually happened and asking the doctor if the doctor agreed based on the video. This doctor was not a patient advocate. In fact, he’s known as being the opposite of a patient advocate—whatever that might be called—and he immediately, upon watching the video, put in the medical records that he had seen the video, he couldn’t believe he’d been lied to about it, he didn’t think any of this was related after all, and, in fact, he wasn’t even going to perform the surgery. The injured person had to get a different doctor. Now what’s the trick? If you watched the video carefully with a more critical eye—which lawyers get trained to do and doctors don’t—you would have realized the video didn’t have the right timestamp on it. It wasn’t the day or the time of the injury.