Causal relationship in neck injuries

Have you suffered a neck injury after a road accident and been refused compensation by your insurance company? The difficulty with these types of injuries is that soft tissue in the neck is damaged. This does not show up on X-rays or MRI scans. How should these types of injuries be assessed when there are no objective findings on examination?

In the L judgement (Rt. 1998 p. 1565), the Supreme Court considered the assessment of evidence in the case of soft tissue injuries to the neck following the whiplash mechanism. In this case, a woman had been the victim of three car collisions (1974, 1988 and 1993). The question was whether the whiplash injury was caused by the rear-end collision in 1988. The Supreme Court ruled on this issue based on four assessment themes. These were outlined by Professor Helge J. Nordal, who was the medical expert in the case. He drew up a four-stage model that can be summarised as follows:

1. Damage capacity
2. Acute symptoms
3. Breast symptoms
4. Compatibility criterion/delimitation against other more probable causes

The Supreme Court has subsequently endorsed this assessment of evidence in several judgements, including Thelle (Rt. 2000 p. 418) and Ask (Rt. 2010 p. 1547). In the case of whiplash injuries, all the criteria must be substantiated. If one or more of the conditions are not substantiated, the insurance company is acquitted. The assessment must be made specifically in the individual case. Our recommendation is to contact a lawyer who specialises in personal injury law and who has detailed knowledge of what these four criteria entail.