Refusing Medical Treatment / Disregarding Advice

Where a doctor or other medical care provider recommends a course of treatment or gives other advice, an injured person cannot refuse the treatment or disregard the doctor's advice and then claim damages for conditions that resulted or persisted because of the failure to follow the advice. An injured person's damages will be reduced if a reasonably prudent person would have followed the medical advice given and the failure to follow the advice resulted in a lack of improvement or aggravation of the injury. For instance, where an injured person unreasonably refuses to lose weight as advised by his or her treating physician, the resulting damages may be accordingly reduced. Likewise, an injured person's failure to return to a doctor or other medical care provider for a continuing condition, especially where persistent pain is involved, may reduce a plaintiff's recovery.

Use of Alternative Treatment

It used to be fairly obvious that an injured person should see a doctor to treat an injury, but the rise of alternative treatments, including acupuncture, chiropractic, holistic and homeopathic remedies, and the use of home remedies are increasingly being used by injured persons. Depending on the nature and severity of an injury, using one of these alternative means, instead of seeking prompt medical treatment, may be unreasonable and may lead to the reduction in the amount of damages an injured person can recover.

Failure to Seek Employment

Finally, a person whose injuries keep him from following his or her usual line of work or trade, but who can work in other areas and types of jobs, cannot sit idly by, doing nothing, and watch his or her losses grow in anticipation of recovering enhanced damages. An injured person's damages will be reduced where he or she can do work of some kind, and where such work is available, but the injured person makes no effort to obtain such work. For instance, a 24-year-old quadriplegic injured in car crash had his damages significantly reduced where he failed to attempt to obtain employment or to enroll in any college courses. In another instance, a longshoreman had his past and future lost earnings reduced by 20% when he failed to keep a number of job interviews, appeared at some interviews in unsuitable attire, and was unwilling to accept employment that would not provide him with a wage equal to the amount he had been making prior to his injury.