Although you may believe in the benefits of non-traditional medicine, generally speaking, these types of experts do not assist significantly in advancing your ICBC claim from a dollar and cents perspective. The reason being, ICBC often puts very little weight on what a non-traditional medicine expert may say about the injuries. This is unfortunate since these sorts of non-traditional experts are sometimes in the best position to accurately describe your injuries.
Rather, family doctors and other specialists in the traditional medical field carry the day with ICBC in terms of proving injuries. Unfortunately, experts like acupuncturists, Chinese medicine specialists or chiropractors have very little influence in how ICBC views the case.
The reason for this stems from judgments in the Court. Generally speaking, the Courts place the most emphasis on the opinions of the traditional medicine experts. There is also reluctance by the Court to admit into evidence the expert opinion evidence from non-traditional medicine experts.
Therefore, if you want to maximize the recovery from ICBC, it’s very important to regularly see a physician in traditional medicine such as your family doctor or a specialist that your family doctor refers you to. These are the types of experts that will provide the necessary expert opinion evidence to prove your injury claim not your Chinese medicine specialist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, etc.
If you believe in non-traditional medicine as a method of helping you in your recovery than by all means continue with that treatment but just make sure you involve traditional medicine doctors at least to the point of making sure that they are recording your complaints on a regular basis and can be called upon to support your injury claim in the form of an expert opinion report.
