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• An independent medical evaluation (IME) by a professional (Physiatrist, Occupational Therapist, Speech and Language Therapist, Psychiatrist, Neuropsychologist, etc.…) provides information (a report) to insurance companies about your medical and rehabilitation needs so they can decide how injured you are and how much to pay for your treatment.

• The insurance company won’t speak to your own rehabilitation treatment providers but will pay their own carefully selected doctors to report in favor of the insurance company (i.e., your injuries aren’t as serious as you say they are).

• IME doctors/professionals willing to assess the injured bring in $2000 per assessment (or more) and often allows them to complete insurance company reports as a full -time very lucrative job.

• IME doctors do not care about you. However, often they will try to make it seem like they do and try to be very nice to you (wolf in sheep’s clothing) to take you off guard so you say something that is harmful to your case. Even if they ask, “how are you today” at the start of the session and you say “good”, they will report that you were feeling good and that maybe your injuries maybe aren’t so bad.

• Your lawyer will have their own IME doctors to counter what the opposing (insurance) IME doctors say about your injuries and help build a case about how disabling your injuries are, and how much more the insurance company should pay out. This “dueling” between IME doctors can take years before your case is settled.

• You will have even more IME assessments if your lawyer is trying to find out if you are catastrophically injured.

• I had 23 IME’s over 6 years. You will feel very torn between having a group of assessors describe that you are doing well, and another that you are doing not well. This will cause you to question how you really are. You will have improved since your accident when you have these assessments, so technically you have improved, and you will be happy about that and be confused that you have to talk about how much your functioning is so poor. The issue is that you need them to assess you compared to how you were functioning the day before your accident.

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