Navigating New Injuries with Pre-Existing Conditions: Your Path to Recovery

A pre-existing condition is essentially any health issue, injury, or physical limitation that was present before your current auto accident or work injury. This could range from an old sports injury that occasionally flares up to chronic low back pain, arthritis, or even a previous whiplash injury that had never been fully resolved.

When a new injury occurs, especially one as traumatic as an auto collision or work-related incident, it often doesn't happen in a vacuum. This new trauma can:

• Aggravate an existing condition: A mild, manageable neck stiffness from an old injury might become more severe, debilitating pain after a rear-end collision.
• Cause a new injury in a previously vulnerable area: A disc that had some age-related degeneration might herniate after a sudden impact.
• Intensify existing symptoms: Your baseline level of chronic pain might increase significantly. 

The key takeaway is this: a new injury, even when superimposed on a pre-existing condition, still warrants and requires appropriate treatment. The legal and medical systems recognize that an at-fault party is responsible for making you "whole again". Our role is to meticulously evaluate, treat, and document this process.

Treating new injuries when pre-existing conditions are present requires a thoughtful and evidence-based approach. Our clinic utilizes several key metrics to understand your baseline, track your progress, and ultimately guide your treatment back to your pre-injury status.

Function (Activities of Daily Living- ADLs): How Your Injury Affects Your Life

One of the most important aspects we assess is your functional capacity, specifically your ADLs. These are the routine tasks you perform daily, such as personal care, mobility, occupational tasks, and recreational activities. Before your new injury, you likely had a certain level of function, even with a pre-existing condition. Perhaps you had some knee arthritis, but could still hike. After a car accident, your knee pain might prevent you from even walking short distances. Our goal is to measure this decline in function due to the new injury and work to restore your ability to perform these ADLs to where they were before the accident or work-related incident. 

We use questionnaires, physical assessments, and your own subjective reports to track improvements in your ADLs, providing clear evidence of how treatment is helping you regain your life. 

Symptoms Intensity: Quantifying Your Pain and Discomfort

Pain is subjective, but its intensity can be a powerful metric for tracking recovery and demonstrating the impact of a new injury. We regularly assess your symptom intensity using various scales, such as:

1. Numeric Pain Rating Scale (NPRS): Asking you to rate your pain 0-10, where 0 is no pain and 10 is the worst.
2. Visual Analog Scale (VAS): A similar concept to NPRS, but using a line to mark your pain level.
3. Specific Questionnaires: Tools like the Oswestry Disability Index for low back pain or the Neck Disability Index for neck pain, which quantify how pain affects specific functional tasks.

In summary, if you had a baseline pain level of 3/10 in your neck due to an old injury, and after a new car accident, it jumps to an 8/10 and remains elevated, this clearly demonstrates the exacerbation caused by the new trauma. Our treatment plans are designed to reduce this elevated symptom intensity, aiming to bring your pain levels back down to, or below, your pre-injury baseline.

Your prior medical records are invaluable in establishing your pre-injury status. These records can include:

• Previous chiropractic notes: Detailing past treatments, diagnoses, and functional levels.
• Physician's notes: From your primary care doctor or specialists.
• Imaging reports: X-rays, MRIs, or CT scans showing degenerative changes or old injuries.
• Physical therapy records: Documenting prior rehabilitation efforts.

By reviewing these records, we gain a comprehensive understanding of your health history, confirming the presence and extent of your preceding conditions. This allows us to accurately identify what is "new" and "aggravated" by the recent incident, versus what was present before. This meticulous comparison is crucial for proper documentation and for substantiating your claim with insurance providers, ensuring they understand the true impact of the new injury.

Our primary goal when treating new injuries with prior conditions is to restore you to your pre-injury status. This means:

• Reducing the increased pain and symptoms caused by the new incident.
• Improving the loss of function or exacerbation of limitations attributed to the new injury.
• Helping you regain the ability to perform your ADLs, work tasks, and recreational activities to the level you enjoyed before the most recent trauma.

In many situations, our chiropractic care can effectively achieve this. Through adjustments, therapeutic exercises, soft tissue work, and patient education, we target the specific tissues and mechanisms affected by the new injury, promoting healing and restoring biomechanical balance.

In situations where the new injury is deeply intertwined with multiple recent auto collisions or work injuries- perhaps you've had several incidents in a short period that all affect the same body region- the case may need to be "apportioned". Apportionment is the process of fairly dividing responsibility for treatment costs among different incidents or insurance claims.

Our clinic is highly experienced in managing these complex scenarios. We meticulously gather all available evidence- your subjective reports, our objective exam findings, and your comprehensive medical history- to support a clear and defensible apportionment. Whether it's a straight percentage of responsibility or an allocation based on distinct injured areas, our aim is to ensure your treatment is properly attributed, allowing you to focus on your recovery without undue financial stress. 

To provide you with the best possible care and navigate any complexities with pre-existing conditions, open and honest communication is paramount. Please inform our staff and doctor about:

• Any and all prior injuries, accidents, or chronic conditions that affect the same or nearby body regions as your current injury.
• Previous treatments you've received for those conditions.
• How your symptoms and function were before this most recent incident.

This information helps us create an accurate picture of your health history, establish a baseline for your treatment, and effectively advocate for your care with insurance providers. You don't have to live with increased pain or reduced function just because you had a pre-existing condition.

Our team in SE Portland is dedicated to helping you overcome the challenges of new injuries, and guiding you back to a healthier, more active life.