Specific beats severe
"Patient reports ongoing back pain" is worth very little. "Patient cannot sit longer than twenty minutes; stopped coaching his daughter's team; sleeping four hours; unable to lift his toddler" is worth a great deal, because it describes function rather than sensation. Function is what damages are calculated from. Describe your week in concrete, boring detail and let the clinician record it.
Consistency across sources
Your family doctor, physiotherapist, specialist and psychologist will all keep records, and the defence will read all of them side by side. Inconsistency reads as unreliability even when it is just an off day or a rushed appointment. Tell the same accurate story everywhere.
Report everything, including the quiet symptoms
Sleep disruption, irritability, low mood, concentration problems, anxiety about driving, avoidance of the location where it happened, headaches, changes in intimacy. These are frequently the symptoms that persist longest and are almost never mentioned, because they feel like complaining rather than injury. They are compensable, and they are invisible unless recorded.
A three-month stretch with no appointments will be characterised as recovery. Often the real reason is a waitlist, cost, childcare, a work schedule or being told to rest — all perfectly good explanations that carry no weight when offered two years later. If you must pause treatment, tell your doctor why and have it noted.
Keep your own parallel record
- A one-line daily symptom and activity note. Contemporaneous, dated, boring, and enormously persuasive.
- Every receipt and every kilometre travelled for treatment.
- Hours of unpaid help from family, with dates — this is a compensable head of damages that is lost constantly for want of a notebook.
- Missed work, missed events, activities abandoned. Specific, dated, concrete.
Request your own records
You are generally entitled to copies of your own medical records, and to your complete claim file from an insurer. Very few people ask. Reading what has actually been written about you — including errors, which are common — is one of the highest-value hours you can spend on your own claim.
Follow the treatment plan, or say why not
You have a legal duty to mitigate — to take reasonable steps to recover. Declining recommended treatment without a documented reason gives the defence a straightforward argument that your ongoing symptoms are your own doing. Cost, side effects, waitlists and fear are all legitimate reasons. They just need to be on the record.