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A pre-existing condition doesn’t disqualify your personal injury case. It can complicate it, since an insurance company will look for a reason to blame your pain on the condition instead of the accident, but Florida law may allow you to recover damages for any aggravation caused by the accident.
The Orlando personal injury lawyer team at DWK Law helps clients draw that line clearly and pursue the compensation you deserve, regardless of what your health looked like before the accident.
No. An insurance adjuster may suggest your pre-existing injury is the real cause of your pain, but that doesn’t make it true, and it doesn’t end your claim. What matters is showing the accident worsened your condition beyond where it already was. That means proving the role the crash played, not the condition itself or its natural progression, which is a medical question your treatment records answer better than anything you say to the adjuster.
The eggshell plaintiff rule is one of the oldest principles in personal injury law: the at-fault party is responsible for the full extent of the harm they caused, even if a pre-existing health condition made your injuries worse than an average person’s would be. If a minor rear-end collision aggravates an old disc injury into one that needs surgery, the at-fault driver may be held responsible for damages related to that surgery, even though an uninjured person in the same crash might have walked away with a bruise.
The law protects you here. The other driver or business can’t argue they should pay less because you were more vulnerable than they assumed, and Florida’s civil jury instructions specifically address aggravation of a pre-existing medical condition for that reason.
A few pre-existing conditions show up in personal injury claims more than others:
A new accident’s physical stress can worsen any of these. Recovering compensation for that usually comes down to documentation: records showing where your condition sat before the accident, and records showing where it went afterward.
Insurance adjusters request your medical records and comb them for anything that shifts the blame away from the accident. A common tactic is pointing to your prior diagnosis and calling your current pain a natural progression, not a result of the crash.
Another is flagging any gap or delay in treatment; if you rescheduled an appointment or waited a few days to see a doctor, they may argue you couldn’t have been hurt that badly. Older notes from previous providers can also get used out of context to question your current symptoms, and the same scrutiny applies to lost wages if your condition already limited your work before the accident.
Be honest about your history, but be careful what you sign. Adjusters sometimes request a blanket medical release covering records that have nothing to do with this claim, which only hands them more material to pick apart.
A well-documented baseline matters most: physician notes and evaluations from before the accident that show what your condition looked like at that point. Post-accident treatment notes show the shift, when your symptoms changed and how quickly. Comparative diagnostic imaging, an MRI or X-ray from before versus after, can make that shift visible rather than just described. In more contested cases, a treating or expert physician can explain to an adjuster or jury how the accident affected a condition you already had.
Winning an aggravation claim comes down to clarity and documentation, showing what changed and why. DWK Law is a Central Florida law firm that’s represented injured people since 1989 and works on a contingency fee basis, so you pay no attorney’s fees or costs unless compensation is recovered.
Call DWK Law at (407) 244-3000 or contact us online for a free consultation about your pre-existing injury claim.
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