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An accident doctor treats injuries caused by a specific event: a fall, a lifting injury at work, a collision, or something dropping on you. The care is the same wherever it happened, but who pays and who chooses your doctor changes completely depending on whether the accident was at work, on the road, or on somebody else’s property. In Florida, a work injury follows different rules from every other kind.
At Injury Care Centers, our team is dedicated to helping people recover after accidents of all kinds. We understand the stress and uncertainty that can come with sudden injuries, and we work together to create a treatment plan that fits your unique situation.
When you visit our Jacksonville clinics, you’ll be met by caring professionals who listen to your concerns, explain your options, and support you at every step. Our doctors, therapists, and staff coordinate closely so you get the highest standard of care, whether your injury happened at work, on the road, or elsewhere.
If you’ve been injured in an accident, don’t wait to get help. Reach out to our Jacksonville team or stop by one of our clinics; walk-ins are welcome, and we’re here to help you get back to feeling your best.
An accident doctor evaluates and treats injuries that come from an identifiable event. That differs from other common scenarios where pain may build up gradually. That difference matters more than you may imagine, since an injury with a specific event or moment attached to it can be examined against the mechanics of that action.
We want to know what you were doing, if you were holding any object, which 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’re the part people forget within a week.
Where the accident happened matters just as much. 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.
Different types of accidents impact the body in different ways, leading to certain injuries that tend to occur together.
We also treat crash injuries and ongoing pain that isn’t tied to a specific accident. You can find the full list of what we treat on our injury clinic page.
Your employer or their insurance company chooses your doctor. Under Florida workers’ compensation law, you usually need to see the doctor they select for your care to be covered. If you pick your own doctor, the insurance company likely won’t pay for it.
This surprises most people and is the main reason injured workers sometimes get unexpected medical bills.
There is a way to request a different doctor, but the process has clear rules. Under Fla. Stat. s. 440.13(2)(f), you have one opportunity to request a new doctor for each work injury. To do this, you must make a written request, like an email or letter, to the insurance company. They have five days to approve a different doctor who isn’t affiliated with your current one. If they don’t do this in time, you get to choose your own doctor.
Three details here are especially important. Your request must be in writing, not just a phone call you can’t prove later. You get one change per accident, not per disagreement. The five-day deadline is for the insurance company, not for you.
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 you were hurt at work and have an open claim, start by finding out who your authorized doctor is and what the insurance company has approved. We can see you for an exam and explain how your workers’ compensation claim fits into the process.
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 doesn’t 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 from the workers’ compensation claim and runs on different rules.
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’s 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 rather than 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’ve already said it out loud.
Write down the specifics while they’re 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 can’t 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.
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 can’t 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 couldn’t be covered, childcare, or an injury that genuinely did seem minor. If you’ve waited, come in anyway and tell us honestly when it happened.
What we’d rather avoid is the version where somebody waits another month because they now feel they’ve 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’re 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; MRI is on site at our University Boulevard South location, and nerve conduction studies are available where the presentation suggests nerve compression.
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 isn’t rushed. What happens at your first visit is set out separately if you’d 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, and that is where the durable part of the improvement comes from. Spinal decompression is used for disc-related presentations at the affected level, and where pain isn’t 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’d rather talk early about what your job actually involves, because “light duties” means something completely different on a warehouse floor 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. Two people who both say they work in a warehouse can be doing entirely different things to their backs.
Telemedicine covers follow-up conversations that don’t need a physical examination, which helps when the alternative is losing another shift.
Jacksonville and Duval County share one government, so a single city covers a very wide range of work, and the injuries follow the work rather than the postcode.
Our Lenox Avenue clinic on the Westside sits among warehousing, distribution, maintenance, and trades employment that runs through that side of the city. The injuries arriving there skew toward lifting, repetitive handling, falls from height, and struck-by events, which present differently than a rear-end collision and require a different examination.
Elsewhere in the county, the mix shifts. Hospital and shift work bring their own handling and standing injuries. Construction along the growth corridors brings falls and crush injuries. The recreational injuries that come with a warm climate and a long outdoor season occur year-round, not just seasonally.
Hurricane season adds a category of its own. Storm cleanup produces ladder falls, chainsaw injuries, lifting injuries from moving debris, and heat-related illness, usually in people doing an unfamiliar task quickly.
It happens, and it usually comes wrapped in something reasonable. We’ll sort it out internally. It’s 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 single cheapest thing you can do for yourself that week.
If you’re being pressured about it, that’s a conversation for a lawyer, not for us. What we can do is examine you, treat what’s wrong, and write down accurately what we find. The same applies if you’re told the injury isn’t work-related because it happened gradually. Repetitive strain injuries are still injuries, and the fact that there’s no single dramatic moment doesn’t change what’s damaged or what it takes to fix it.
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 won’t stop.
Serious injuries across northeast Florida go to UF Health Jacksonville, the region’s Level I trauma center. A crush injury, a fall from height, or a suspected spine or pelvis fracture belongs there, not here.
Everything short of that is what a walk-in injury clinic is for. Being unsure is a perfectly good reason to come in and let somebody look properly.
| Area | Address | Weekday hours |
|---|---|---|
| Murray Hill, Riverside, Westside | 5222 Lenox Ave | 8:30 am to 6:30 pm |
| Oakleaf, Argyle | 9680 Argyle Forest Blvd, Suite 20 | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
| Oceanway, Northside | 13453 North Main St N, Suite 501 | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
| Southside | 9191 RG Skinner Pkwy, Suite 201 | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
| University, MRI on site | 4004 University Blvd S | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
| Mandarin | 3560 Cardinal Point Dr, Suite 101 | 8:30 am to 6:00 pm |
We also have a clinic at Jacksonville Beach, on 16th Avenue North.
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.
Generally no. 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 main Jacksonville clinics take 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 simple yet strong 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’s 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 and MRI at University Boulevard South, so an examination and the imaging it prompts don’t become two appointments two weeks apart.
The single most useful thing to know about a work accident is that the written request starts a five-day clock, but a phone call does not. So, come in at any Jacksonville clinic on a weekday, call 904-783-0008 if you want to talk it through first, or find addresses and hours for all our Jacksonville 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.
