What is whiplash?

Whiplash compensation can be claimed by those who get injured from a whiplash. Whiplash is a very common injury usually caused during a road accident. For example, during a car accident there is a sudden forward and backward motion of your body and neck due to sudden deceleration or acceleration. This causes a strong effect and damage to your neck which is called whiplash neck injury.

Symptoms of whiplash injury
Whiplash injury is unlike any other type of injury when it comes to showing the symptoms. Usually the symptoms of whiplash will not be apparent until next morning or as late as 48 hours after the accident. The whiplash will cause:

• Headache which is mostly in the forehead behind the eyes or back of the head towards the neck.
• Neck pain
• or both of them meaning headache and neck pain. In this case the headache will be more at first and then it will subside and neck pain will be more substantial. Neck pain may be prolonged and may lead to Osteoarthritis in future.
• Dizziness
• shoulder stiffness
• Sleep problems
• muscle injury
• maybe memory loss in severe cases.

It may take 3 to 6 months to recover from a whiplash. But in sever cases it can be much longer than that which can become pretty costly for you. It affects your work since you may have to be away from work for some time. Not only work, it may affect your ability to do day today work like basic chores, picking up children from school and make you dependent on your family members.

How to claim for whiplash injury?

There is a provision for you to claim for whiplash compensation. It will not make you feel better physically but at least it will help you financially in difficult times. You can claim for expenses you had to incur due to whiplash and also all loss of income during that period. Usually, such whiplash compensations are common for injuries which are caused during road accidents. But you need take care of a few things before applying for this type of claim. Some of them are listed below.

As soon as possible after the accident, note down the following points for further reference:

• where exactly the accident took place
• when the accident happened, what was the weather condition
• were there any witnesses to the accident who could potentially verify your story
• what was the time of the accident
• what conversation happened between the two parties after the accident
• if possible, take a few pictures of the car and surroundings after the accident to capture the damage done to the car as well as general weather conditions.

As mentioned above, the symptoms of whiplash are not apparent just after the accident and they start to show up after at least a night's sleep. Therefore many people don't take it seriously to go and get themselves medically examined. When the pain starts then they go to the hospital. But this may be too late from claim's perspective. Since it can be a counter argument from opposite side that the pain can be due to some other reason which happened after the accident. Therefore, it is absolutely important to get the medical examination done as soon as possible.

After the medical examination, you can consult your doctor to confirm that the injury is a whiplash and then decide whether you want to claim for the compensation. You can take help from a personal injury attorney or specialist who would work on no win no fee basis and represent your case. The damages you can apply for in this type of case can include:

• medical bills
• loss of income
• doctor consultation fees
• emotional distress
• pain and suffering etc

The amount of damages which can be claimed depends on a number of things like:

• severity of the injury
• part of the body where injury happened (head injuries are more complex in nature than shoulder)
• how long it will take to recover from injury
• the fault of party (whether it was completely his fault or it was partly his mistake)
• location of accident.

In case the injury happened on the workplace of the injured, you can claim for worker's compensation or whiplash claim but not both. Consult your doctor and injury specialist before deciding the course of action. Since whiplash compensation is pretty common now a days, it is not difficult to claim it but most people are just not aware about it or don't take the trouble of going through this process.