Know what’s wrong. Know what’s next.
Florida gives you 14 days from the accident to seek treatment before your PIP medical benefits are gone. Not reduced. Gone. Get evaluated at either Jacksonville or Orange Park.
Under Florida Statute 627.736 you must seek initial medical treatment within 14 days of a motor vehicle accident to access your Personal Injury Protection benefits. Miss that window and PIP medical benefits are forfeited entirely. Treated inside it but with no documented emergency medical condition, benefits are capped at $2,500 instead of $10,000. Feeling fine is not a reason to wait — soft-tissue injury commonly becomes symptomatic days later.
Three outcomes, decided by one date.
This is a summary of how the statute works, not legal advice. Questions about your specific claim belong with an attorney. Our part is the medical evaluation and the documentation that supports it.
What to do first.
- Get evaluated, even if you feel fine. Adrenaline masks injury for hours, sometimes a day. The evaluation both documents your condition and starts the clock properly.
- Write down what you notice. Stiffness, headaches, sleep changes, difficulty concentrating. Symptoms that emerge over the following days matter clinically and are easy to forget by the time anyone asks.
- Do not accept a quick settlement before you know your injuries. Soft-tissue damage frequently declares itself after the first week. That is a conversation for an attorney, but the timing is worth knowing.
- Keep moving gently. Complete rest tends to prolong soft-tissue recovery. Gentle movement within comfort is generally better than immobilising yourself on the sofa.
- Go to an emergency department instead if you have red flags. Loss of consciousness, worsening headache, numbness or weakness, severe neck pain, confusion, or vomiting after a head impact are emergency-department matters, not clinic matters.
You felt fine on Tuesday and could not turn your head on Thursday.
Two things are happening. The immediate stress response after a collision raises circulating adrenaline, which suppresses pain perception for a period. People routinely describe walking away from a significant impact feeling shaken but not hurt.
The second is inflammation, which is not immediate. Soft-tissue injury sets off an inflammatory response that builds over the following 24 to 72 hours. Pain and stiffness track that curve rather than the moment of impact, which is why the second and third days are so often worse than the first.
Whiplash-type injury is the clearest example. The neck decelerates through a range it was not prepared for, and the resulting damage to soft tissue and joint capsules commonly presents days later as stiffness, headache, and pain that refers into the shoulder or arm.
These are not competing decisions.
People often delay medical care while deciding whether to pursue a claim, which gets the order backwards. The 14-day window is statutory and runs whether or not you have engaged an attorney. It does not pause while you think about it.
Being evaluated first also means that if you do pursue a claim, your injuries are documented contemporaneously rather than reconstructed weeks later. That is better medicine and, as it happens, better documentation.
We do not give legal advice, do not represent you, and have no view on whether you should engage an attorney. Where one is involved, we coordinate on records. What we do is examine you, reach a diagnosis, treat what is treatable, refer what is not, and document all of it properly.
Common questions after an accident
The clock started at the accident.
Evaluation at Jacksonville or Orange Park. If what you need is an emergency department or a specialist, we will tell you that instead.
Request an evaluation