A pre-existing condition often lowers the first offer an insurer makes, but it does not bar you from recovering for the harm a crash caused. The real fight is apportionment. How much of today’s pain was already there, and how much did this collision add? That line gets drawn with medical records, treatment history, imaging, and testimony, not with an adjuster’s opinion. A Washington, D.C. personal injury attorney at Simeone & Miller, LLP builds the before and after picture that keeps an insurer from writing your entire claim off as old news.
What Adjusters Do With Your Medical History
Once you report an injury, the insurer will ask you to sign a medical authorization. Those forms are often written broadly enough to reach years of unrelated care. The adjuster is looking for a prior complaint in the same body region so the file can be valued as a flare-up rather than a new injury.
Adjusters typically hunt for a small set of items in those records:
- Any earlier visit involving the neck, back, shoulder, or knee you are now treating
- Degenerative findings on imaging, which are common as people age and do not always cause pain
- Gaps between the crash date and your first treatment
- Prior claims, prior collisions, or prior workers’ compensation files
- Statements in your own words that sound like your pain predates the crash
None of those findings actually defeat a claim. They simply give the insurer a story, and the answer is a better documented story of your own. That is why what you sign in the first weeks matters as much as what you eventually prove.
Aggravation Versus a Condition That Was Already There
The law does not pay you twice for pain you already had. It does pay you for the amount a negligent driver made you worse. Under the long-standing common law principle often called the Eggshell Plaintiff Rule, a person who negligently injures someone takes that person as they find them, including a body that was already fragile.
In practice, that means your claim is measured by the change. If you managed occasional low back stiffness for years and now cannot lift your child or sit through a workday, the compensable injury is that decline. The same logic covers a shoulder that was arthritic and functional before the crash and now needs surgery.
Insurers usually do not dispute the principle. They dispute the size of the change, which is a factual question about your baseline. The stronger and more specific your baseline evidence, the smaller the room to argue that nothing really changed.
Why Blaming Your Health History Has Limits
There is a limit to how far a defendant can push your own history back at you. A Maryland appellate court has held that a patient’s conduct before treatment, meaning the conduct that created the condition the provider was hired to address, cannot be used against that patient as contributory negligence. In reaching that result, the court followed reasoning that rests on the long-standing principle that a wrongdoer takes the victim as found.
That decision arose in a medical negligence case, so it does not set the damages formula for a car crash. It matters because it shows a court in this region rejecting the broadest version of the argument insurers like most, which is that a claimant’s own body or choices should absorb the loss.
How Three Sets of Rules Change the Math
A crash anywhere in the DMV can land in any of three court systems, and the differences are not cosmetic.
The District of Columbia and Maryland both follow contributory negligence, which is close to an all-or-nothing rule. Maryland’s highest court has confirmed that a plaintiff whose own lack of ordinary care helped cause the injury can be barred from recovering anything, no matter how negligent the other driver was. Virginia applies the same all-or-nothing contributory negligence rule, softened only by the last clear chance doctrine, and it has no counterpart to the District’s exception for pedestrians and riders.
Narrow exceptions may exist. In the District, for example, a pedestrian or cyclist (or other vulnerable road user) struck by a motor vehicle on a public road or sidewalk is barred only if their own negligence both helped cause the injury and was greater than the combined negligence of the defendants.
Filing windows differ too, and they are unforgiving:
- In the District, most injury lawsuits must be filed within three years of the date the claim accrues
- In Maryland, the general civil deadline is also three years
- In Virginia, the deadline for personal injury actions is two years
Those deadlines apply to the whole claim, including the aggravation portion, and a case that crosses jurisdictional lines can raise real questions about which one governs. Our Washington, D.C. car accident lawyers sort all of that out at intake rather than at the end.
Building the Before and After Record
The claimants who do best are the ones whose files answer the apportionment question before the adjuster asks it. That work starts with honesty. Hiding a prior injury does far more damage than the injury itself once the records surface.
A well-built file usually includes several kinds of proof:
- Pre-crash records that show how limited or how functional you actually were
- A treating physician who states clearly what changed and why the crash caused it
- Imaging compared side by side rather than read in isolation
- Testimony from a spouse, coworker, or coach about your activity level before and after
- Consistent treatment without long unexplained gaps
Assembled together, those pieces convert a vague argument about old injuries into a measurable difference a jury can value. That is what moves a claim past a nuisance offer.
Talk With Us About Your Injuries
If an insurer is using your medical history to discount what happened to you, get advice before you sign anything else. Simeone & Miller has represented injured people across the District, Maryland, and Virginia since 2002, and you pay no fee unless we win. Contact Simeone & Miller today for a free consultation to discuss your case.
