Exacerbation or Activation of Degenerative Disk Disease from Auto Accidents and Other Serious Injuries.

Hi, I’m Tim Williams with Dwyer Williams Potter Attorneys.  I’m the lead litigation attorney here at the firm and also one of the partners.  Let’s talk about degenerative disk disease.

Here we have a model of a nice, healthy back. We see a big, thick disk here that’s nice and soft and supple that allows for plenty of movement.  We see some very smooth bones above and below.

Here we have a disk and some bones that are from the back that’s later on in life, and so we see some loss of disk space height that is not as thick, there is not nearly the separation there was between the two bones as we saw it before. And also the disk is sticking out a little bit and it’s turned red, signifying that it’s lost its suppleness.  It’s harder; it’s not as bendable or pliable as it was before.

We also see here on the right just a little bit of lipping, so the bones are starting to grow out and over the disk itself.  This is a section of the back taken much later in life, perhaps in the 60s or 75s; it’s different with each person.  But we can see there’s a great loss of the disk space height here; there’s hardly any separation between the two levels of bone, and we see quite a bit of lipping or osteophyte formation, also known as bone spurs.  And that’s where the bones are actually growing out towards each other over the disk.

Finally, we have this disk here—well, it’s kind of hard to see the disk is in the middle.  You can see that gray substance.  That’s actually the disk.  It’s completely dried up or desiccated.  This is much, much later in life.  This is perhaps in someone’s 90s; maybe late 80s, early 90s.  We see quite a bit of the osteophyte formation; in other words, the bones are spurring out and over.  They’re actually touching, and this sets somebody up for some pretty severe accident or injury should they fall down stairs or become —-or what have you.

So, as you can see, as we get older, the disks continue to degenerate.  There is some bone spurring that occurs and the disks lose their functionality.  What is interesting though is we can reach this level or even this level and never have any symptoms whatsoever.  However, if there’s an inciting event, such as a fall down some stairs, a slip on a wet floor, a rear-end car collision, that can incite the pain and can incite accident or injury to that level where the bones are touching each other, perhaps breaking a bone or chipping a bone off, and that can cause quite a bit of interference with a person’s life.

Now, when an insurance company looks at this and they say, oh, what we see on the X-rays, you know, your disk is at this level here.  There’s quite a bit of disk space height that’s lost, there’s quite a bit of bone spurring, there’s maybe even some bone-on-bone contact.  Heck, we’re not paying for your injuries because we think it’s due to this condition and not because of the fact that our client rear-ended you at a stoplight.

Thankfully, Oregon law protects folks in this situation because it provides that you can have a condition like this, it can be asymptomatic or not have any symptoms at all, and if something happens to you, an inciting event that causes the symptoms to occur, then you get to recover.

So, hopefully, this has been beneficial for you, and I want to thank you for watching this video.  And feel free to

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Degenerative Disk Disease:

Degeneration of the intervetrebral disk can cause severe pain and interference with one’s daily activities. Disk degeneration is a normal part of aging, and for most people does not cause a problem. As a result of disk degeneration, the disk becomes dehydrated, reducing its ability to act as a shock absorber, causes a reduction in the space between the vertebrae, and may also bulge outward. This causes people to become more susceptible to accident or injury, thereby requiring less force to do the same damage to the spine than a younger person. This is known as a prior infirm condition. Unfortunately, disk degeneration also predisposes a person to disk herniation. Trauma, such as a simple car collision or fall, is the most common cause of the activation of symptoms caused by degenerative disk disease.

Insurance companies love degenerative disk disease, because it gives them an excuse to explain the pain. They argue that they shouldn’t have to pay to fix a condition that was already there. It is the pain, however, that is the key. If the traumatic event causes the pain to present or increase, even to the point that a surgery is necessary, the law says that you can recover for the surgery. Only experienced personal accident or injury attorneys know how to defuse the insurance company’s bunk arguments.