If you search our site you will see a few posts where we talk about surveillance in Illinois work comp cases. If you have a serious, long term injury, don’t be surprised if a private detective is following you around. As a lawyer, that doesn’t bother me at all because as long as my clients are honest and listen to their doctors, the video they get on you will likely amount to nothing and won’t affect your case at all.
I was thinking of this the other day when discussing a pain management doctor that many insurance companies use for independent medical examinations (IME). He gets a lot of business because he is certainly more likely to tell the insurance company what they want to hear than what you want them to hear. But he also gets a lot of business because he is very thorough.
The most thorough thing that he does is spy on those that visit him. He or his staff will watch you as you are walking in to his building and will also watch you when you leave. If you are walking normally in the parking lot, but limping and wincing in his office, his IME report will say that you are full of it and it will hurt your case.
So it all goes back to the point of being honest. There is no reason to embellish your symptoms for a doctor or anyone else. Aside from being bad karma, it’s just not smart. Doctors are trained and experienced at what they do. So are insurance companies and the lawyers that they hire (along with the lawyer you hire of course/hopefully). Point is that you can almost never fool them because there isn’t much that they haven’t seen. You are actually better served by not limping at all, assuming that reflects your true health, than trying to show how hurt you really are.
In fact, most IME doctors perform truth tests of some sort, they just don’t tell you that they are doing it. Many clients are surprised when they see comments about this in the reports that the IME doctors write. But you have to remember, they aren’t your doctor, they are the doctor for the insurance company.
It’s human nature to want people to believe you. But trying to influence them with anything other than the truth, especially in an Illinois workers’ compensation claim, is a terrible idea that could potentially ruin your life. So if you do just one thing on your case, please just tell it like it is.
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