904-783-0008
904-800-6389
At our firm, we understand that an accident can change everything in an instant. Whether you’ve experienced a fall, a workplace injury, a car collision, or any sudden event, the aftermath might be overwhelming.
Our team focuses on evaluating and treating injuries caused by specific incidents, with an in-depth understanding that the rules and systems for care, and who pays for it, can vary dramatically depending on where and how your accident occurred. Florida, in particular, has unique laws and requirements for workplace injuries that set them apart from other types of accidents.
At Injury Care Centers, treating pain and injuries is all we do, and it’s the foundation of our practice. Our Green Cove Springs clinic on Branscomb Road is designed to meet our community’s needs. We offer walk-in appointments on weekdays, so you can get trusted care quickly, without a referral.
Our approach is based on careful evaluation and treatment of injuries tied to a specific incident, rather than those that develop over time. This distinction is important, as knowing the mechanics of your accident allows us to tailor care to your unique situation and to document your case accurately from the outset. With our experience, we know how important the details are when it comes to both treatment and managing the paperwork that follows an accident.
As your dedicated accident injury team, we focus on the specifics: how you were moving, what you were carrying, what actions you were taking, and what was happening around you at the time of your accident. These details help us understand the forces involved and the circumstances of your injury. They inform our clinical decisions and ensure that your medical records show exactly what happened, information that’s important for both your recovery and any claims you may pursue.
We want to know what your body was doing when it happened. What you were holding, the direction the force came from, whether you were braced, whether your grip failed or your foot slipped, and how you landed. Those details narrow the list of likely injuries before anyone touches you, and they are the details people forget within a week.
Where the accident happened matters just as much, for a different reason. A crash, a fall at work, and a fall in a supermarket each run into a different system for paying the bills, and each of those systems has its own rules about who is allowed to treat you.
That last point is what most of this page is about. The medicine barely changes. The paperwork changes enormously, and getting it wrong at the start is expensive.
Green Cove Springs has an industrial base that looks nothing like a suburban market, and the injuries follow the work.
Reynolds Industrial Park, also known as the Clay County Port, runs to roughly 1,700 acres on the southern edge of the city. It was Naval Air Station Lee Field during the Second World War, then home to a mothball fleet of several hundred ships afterward, and the city annexed it in the 1980s. What makes it unusual now is that it has access by land, rail, a nd water, which is a rare combination anywhere and rarer still in a town of ten thousand people.
Three transport modes mean three sets of handling injuries. Freight coming off a rail car is loaded differently from freight coming off a barge, and both are different again from a truck bay. Lifting, pulling, securing, and the awkward mid-load correction when something shifts unexpectedly are the mechanisms behind most of the back and shoulder injuries we see from that work.
Marine work adds its own risks. Anything done on a deck or a dock involves an unstable surface, wet steel, and awkward postures while lifting, and the falls that result tend to be onto something hard from an odd angle.
Reynolds Airpark, the private airfield on the site with its single 5,000-foot runway, brings aviation maintenance work into the mix. That means overhead work, confined spaces, and the shoulder and neck problems that come from holding a position rather than moving through one.
Beyond the port, the county’s employment reaches in other directions. Construction has followed the growth along the expressway corridor. Agricultural and equestrian work continues in the southern county, and horses in particular produce a distinctive injury set: falls from height onto hard ground, crush injuries, and hand and wrist damage from a rope or rein under sudden load.
Then there is hurricane season, which produces its own category every year. Storm cleanup means ladder falls, chainsaw injuries, lifting injuries from moving debris, and heat-related illness, usually in people doing an unfamiliar task quickly.
Different accidents load the body differently, and the resulting injuries cluster in ways useful to know.
Lumbar disc herniation and bulging discs, sacroiliac joint pain, facet joint irritation, and the muscle and ligament strains that follow a load shifting unexpectedly. The classic version is not a heavy lift; it is a moderate one done while turning.
Fractures, wrist and elbow injuries from a straight-armed landing, rotator cuff tears, hip and pelvis injuries, knee injuries including meniscus and ligament damage, and head injuries including concussion.
Carpal tunnel and ulnar tunnel symptoms, tendinitis and bursitis at the shoulder and elbow, plantar fasciitis, and neck and upper back pain that comes from holding a working posture. These rarely have a moment to point at, which makes the history harder and the examination more important.
Contusions, fractures, nerve compression,n and soft-tissue damage that runs deeper than the bruise on the surface suggests. This category is over-represented in freight and marine work, and it is the one where the visible injury most often understates what happened underneath.
We treat crash injuries alongside all of these, and plenty of ongoing pain with no accident behind it. The full range is on our injury clinic page.
Your employer or their insurance carrier does. Under Florida workers’ compensation law, the carrier selects the authorized treating physician, and you generally have to treat with that provider for the care to be covered. Choosing your own doctor and expecting the carrier to pay is not how the system works.
That comes as a surprise to almost everybody, and it is the most common reason a work-injured patient ends up with a bill they were not expecting.
There is a route to a different doctor, and it is specific.
Under Fla. Stat. s. 440.13(2)(f), on written request, the carrier must give you one opportunity to change physicians during treatment for any one accident.
The carrier then has to authorize an alternative physician who is not professionally affiliated with the previous one, within five days of your request. If it fails to provide the change, you may select the physician yourself.
Three details in that paragraph do real work. The request has to be in writing, which means an email or a letter and not a phone call you will later be unable to prove. It is one change per accident, not one per disagreement. And the five-day clock runs against the carrier.
How does the one-time change of physician work in Florida?
Fla. Stat. s. 440.13(2)(f) requires the carrier, on written request, to give the employee one opportunity to change physicians during treatment for any one accident. The carrier must authorize an alternative physician who is not professionally affiliated with the previous one within five days. If it does not, the employee may select the physician.
If your accident happened at work and a claim is open, the right first step is to find out who your authorized provider is and what the carrier has approved. We can see you and examine you, and we will tell you plainly where a workers’ compensation claim stands in relation to that. What we will not do is encourage anyone to seek treatment outside the authorized channel without understanding what it means for their claim.
Usually not. Workers’ compensation is a trade: you get benefits without proving fault, and in exchange your employer is protected from being sued.
Under Fla. Stat. s. 440.11, workers’ compensation is the employee’s exclusive remedy against the employer, and that protection applies even where the employer was negligent.
People find this hard to accept, because the negligence feels like it ought to be the whole point.
What the rule does not bar is a claim against somebody else. If a subcontractor, a delivery driver, a property owner, an equipment manufacturer, or another motorist caused the accident, that sits on a separate track and runs on different rules. On a site where several companies operate alongside each other, which is common in freight and industrial work, that distinction comes up more often than people expect.
Whether either route applies to your situation is a question for a lawyer, not for us and not for a web page. Our job is the injury. It is worth knowing both tracks exist, because somebody who believes workers’ compensation is their only option often stops asking.
Report it to your employer in a way that leaves a record, get examined instead of waiting to see how it settles, and write down what happened while you still remember it precisely. Ask what has been submitted and to which carrier. If a claim is open, find out who your authorized provider is before you go anywhere else.
A conversation in a corridor is a report in every practical sense and is not one in any useful sense a month later. Follow it up by text or email even if you have already said it out loud.
Write down the specifics while they are fresh: what you were lifting and roughly how heavy it was, where your feet were, what gave way, whether anyone saw it, and what you felt in the first hour compared with the next morning. Memory for this kind of detail goes quickly.
Keep a note of what you cannot do, too. Not a pain diary in the usual sense, but a functional one. The shift you shortened, the load you handed to somebody else, the stairs you took differently. That record is more useful clinically than a number out of ten, and it holds up better later.
It happens, and it usually comes wrapped in something reasonable. We will sort it out internally. It is not worth the paperwork. Reporting it will affect the safety record.
Report it anyway, and put it in writing.
An unreported injury that turns out to need months of treatment becomes your problem to pay for, and reconstructing what happened six weeks later is far harder than writing it down the same afternoon. The record also protects you if the same injury flares later, because an undocumented accident is very difficult to connect to a symptom that shows up in the spring.
None of that requires a confrontation. An email saying what happened, when it happened, and what you felt afterward is a report. It takes two minutes, and it is the cheapest thing you can do for yourself that week.
The same applies if you are told the injury is not work-related because it happened gradually. Repetitive strain injuries are still injuries, and the absence of a single dramatic moment does not change what is damaged or what it takes to fix it.
Waiting causes two separate problems, and only one of them is clinical.
The clinical problem is that the injury changes while you wait. Guarding patterns set in, other muscles take over the work of the injured ones, and a straightforward strain at day two can present at week five as a broader problem involving structures that were never damaged. Treatment then has to unpick the compensation before it can address the original injury.
The other problem cannot be fixed retrospectively. Nobody can record what your shoulder could do in the first week except during the first week. A late examination documents where you are, not where you started, and the difference between those two is what shows you were hurt.
None of that means a delay is fatal. People wait for entirely sensible reasons: a shift that could not be covered, childcare, or an injury that genuinely did seem minor. If you have waited, come in anyway and tell us honestly when it happened.
What we would rather avoid is the version where somebody waits another month because they now feel they have left it too late. That turns a two-week delay into a two-month one, and the second month is the expensive part.
Plan on about an hour, and most of it is examination.
Your clinician takes the history of the event in detail. Tests range of motion, strength, reflexes, sensation, and joint stability, presses on the structures that reproduce your symptoms, and runs the orthopedic and neurological tests the history pointed at.
Baseline measurements get recorded, because they are what make progress demonstrable at week four instead of a matter of how you feel on the morning of an appointment.
Digital X-ray is available in the practice for suspected fracture and alignment, and nerve conduction studies are available where the presentation suggests nerve compression. MRI is at our University Boulevard South location in Jacksonville, and we book you there when a scan will change the treatment.
You leave with a working diagnosis, a plan, and a statement of what would change it. Where a report or a form is needed for a claim, we produce it from what the examination found, and the accuracy of that record is why the examination is not rushed. What happens at your first visit is set out separately if you would rather know in advance.
Treatment starts at the first visit and is built around restoring movement and the ability to carry load.
Chiropractic care addresses joint restriction and the guarding that develops around a painful area. Physical therapy and physical medicine cover strengthening and progression, which is where the durable part of the improvement comes from. Spinal decompression is used for disc-related presentations at the affected level. Where pain is not settling with movement-based care, we have laser, shockwave, TECAR, HEIT, electrical muscle stimulation, and therapeutic ultrasound, with injections and prescriptions available inside the practice.
Return to work belongs in the plan, not a conversation at the end of it. We would sooner talk early about what your job actually involves, because “light duties” means something completely different on a dock than at a desk, and a restriction written without that detail is either useless or unworkable.
Tell us what your day contains, not your job title. Somebody who says they work at the port might be driving a forklift, securing freight by hand, or doing paperwork in an office, and those are three different backs.
Telemedicine covers follow-up conversations that do not need a physical examination, which helps when the alternative is losing another shift.
Some symptoms need an emergency room, not a clinic.
Call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room for loss of consciousness, a headache that keeps worsening, repeated vomiting, confusion or trouble speaking, numbness or weakness in an arm or leg, loss of bladder or bowel control, severe or quickly worsening pain, chest pain, trouble breathing, an obviously deformed limb, or bleeding that will not stop.
Clay County’s trauma center is HCA Florida Orange Park Hospital, a Level II facility. It is in the county, not in this city, so someone with a crush injury, a fall from height, or a suspected spine or pelvis fracture is transported north. On an industrial site, that is a reason to call 911 rather than put someone in a car, because the decision about where they go is better made by the people who arrive.
Everything short of that is what a walk-in injury clinic is for.
It depends on how you were hurt. For a work injury, workers’ compensation usually applies and has its own rules about which doctor you see. After a car accident, your own auto insurance covers medical care as long as you are seen within 14 days. For everything else, health insurance is the normal route.
We see patients with or without insurance. If you do not have coverage, call 904-783-0008 and ask about our Affordable Plans.
Bring whatever paperwork you have to the first visit, including anything from your employer or the carrier, and our team will explain what applies to your situation.
| Clinic | Address | Weekday hours |
|---|---|---|
| Green Cove Springs | 91 Branscomb Rd, Suite 1 | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
Our Green Cove Springs clinic serves the city of Green Cove Springs, along with Fleming Island, Middleburg, Penney Farms, and the surrounding Clay County communities.
Weekday hours open earlier and close later than a standard working day, which is deliberate, because somebody choosing between an appointment and a shift will choose the shift. No appointment is needed on weekdays, and we see patients with or without insurance. At weekends, call 904-783-0008 and ask for a same-day visit.
Fla. Stat. s. 440.13 gives the employer or carrier the right to select the authorized treating physician, with a statutory route to one change on written request.
No, our Green Cove Springs clinic takes walk-in patients on weekdays, and you can call 904-783-0008 for a same-day appointment on weekends.
Yes, work injuries, falls, sports injuries, and everyday joint and muscle injuries are all treated here.
No, delayed presentation is common because symptoms build over days, and being examined now is better than waiting further.
We produce clinical records and reports from what the examination finds. What a particular claim requires is a question for the adjuster or a lawyer.
Yes, we see patients with or without insurance. Call 904-783-0008 and ask about our Affordable Plans.
Tell your clinician at the first visit. An old injury that was already there changes what the findings mean and how the plan is built.
Our practice was built around one idea: treat injuries and nothing else. Seeing injured people all day is what lets our doctors spend the time an accident history actually takes, and it is why the questions are about mechanism, not symptoms alone.
Injury Care Centers brings chiropractic care, physical medicine, athletic training, and medical input into one plan, with digital X-ray in the building.
Dr. John D’Amico is the chiropractic physician covering our Green Cove Springs clinic. The single most useful thing to know about a work accident is that the written request in s. 440.13(2)(f) starts a five-day clock, and a phone call does not. Come to Branscomb Road on any weekday, call 904-783-0008 if you want to talk it through first, or find addresses and hours for all our locations.
Last reviewed: August 2026
Medically reviewed by John Linder, ARNP, Florida license no. APRN11028112
This page is general information and not a substitute for an exam by a clinician. If you have emergency symptoms, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.
Florida law described here is general information, not legal advice. Deadlines and rights depend on your situation, and a lawyer is the right person to advise you on a claim.
