What the insurance company does not want you to know: in Massachusetts, you usually have 3 years to sue over an accident injury, and an old MRI does not wipe out your claim if the crash made your condition worse.

That is the key point. Massachusetts law allows recovery when someone's negligence aggravates a pre-existing condition. The insurer will act like "you already had back problems" ends the case. It doesn't. If a charter bus crash on Memorial Drive, a hydroplaning wreck on Route 2, or a slide accident worsened your neck, back, knee, or shoulder, the worsening matters.

This is the rule people mean when they talk about the eggshell plaintiff idea: the at-fault party takes you as you were. If you were more vulnerable because of an old injury, they are still on the hook for the harm they caused.

What insurers do in real life is weaponize your old records. They pull prior MRIs, physical therapy notes, and pain complaints, then argue "nothing new here." Your job is to force the timeline:

• what symptoms you had before
• what changed after
• what treatment increased
• what work limits started after the accident

If you were hurt while driving for work, between job sites, or riding in a company vehicle, do not let your boss in Cambridge tell you to just use your own health insurance. A work-related crash can trigger workers' comp through the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents, and you may also have a separate claim against the other driver. Those are different lanes.

Tell every doctor the same plain facts: old condition, new accident, new symptoms, worse pain, missed work, lifting limits. If you treated at Mass General or Brigham, make sure the records clearly say "aggravation of pre-existing condition" if that is what happened.

The fight is usually not whether you had an old injury. It is whether the accident made it measurably worse.