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Citation: The Effect of Litigation Status on Adjustment to Whiplash Injury. Swartzman, LC, Teasell, RE, Shapiro, AP, McDermid, AJ. Spine, 1996, 21:53-58. Department of Psychology and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, University of Western Ontario, and the Department of Psychology, University Hospital, London, Ontario, Canada. Abstract: The authors set out to test the hypothesis that litigation status would predict the employment status, in a group of patients who sustained whiplash injuries after a motor vehicle accident. In this cohort, 41 patients in litigation (current litigants) and 21 patients who had completed litigation (post-litigants), they examined the validity of the commonly held view that pending litigation compromises rehabilitation efforts, viz. the concept of "compensation neurosis". This term is frequently used to describe patients who, lacking identifiable physical causes for their pain, are suspected of fabricating or exaggerating symptoms for financial gain. It has been described (see Miller, H. BMJ 1961:1, 19-25), “as a state of mind born out of fear, kept alive by avarice, stimulated by lawyers, and cured by a verdict." Nowhere, is the assumption that financial (secondary) gain promotes reports of pain and disability more pronounced than in the case of chronic whiplash injury. In this study, and contrary to popular belief, analysis (ANOVA) of the data failed to confirm the hypothesis. Since litigation status did not predict the hard endpoint of employment status, the findings indicate that secondary gain did not figure prominently in influencing the functionality of these patients. Commentary: It is a popular notion that the mere act of engaging in litigation for injury related pain, particularly in the absence of confirmatory physical findings, is in and of itself evidence of malingering and secondary gain. In discussing closed head injuries, in a series of articles in the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Attorney K.I. Kolpan notes that 'personal-injury attorneys often face an uphill battle in proving their cases, given juror skepticism'. He points out that attorneys must spend a lot of time educating the jury about how extraneous factors did not cause malingering. The article by Swartzman suggests that before getting to the issues specific to your case, it is necessary to disabuse the jury of this commonly but erroneously held belief. The results of this study and those of similar studies cited in this article, should be in the quiver of your Expert Medical Witness. For a FREE subscription to Report of the Month, click the link below.
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