What Happens If I Need an MRI? (And What Happens After?)

At some point in a lot of comp claims, the doctor says the words “let’s get an MRI.” For most people that sentence carries two feelings at once: relief that somebody is finally looking, and dread about what the picture might show. Both are reasonable. Here’s how the process actually works, and—just as important—what the results do and don’t mean.

What Happens If I Need an MRI?

In a Missouri workers’ comp claim, the authorized doctor doesn’t just hand you an order and send you down the hall. The recommendation generally goes to the insurance carrier for authorization first, because the employer and insurer direct the medical care in a comp claim (§287.140). An adjuster—sometimes with a utilization-review process behind them—decides whether to approve the scan, and then it gets scheduled at a facility the carrier arranges.

Which means: you wait. Some authorizations come through in days. Others sit. A reasonable amount of processing time is normal; weeks of silence while your symptoms are getting worse is not, and it’s worth polite, documented follow-up—call the adjuster, note the date, ask when a decision is expected. If the answer is a stall that never ends or an outright refusal, that’s a known problem with known responses, and I’ve written about it in what to do when the insurance company won’t authorize treatment. It is also one of the most common disputes on our denied and disputed claims files.

A nurse’s note about the scan itself: an MRI is painless but noisy and slow, and you’ll be asked to hold still in a tube for a while. If you’re claustrophobic, say so when it’s scheduled, not when you’re lying on the table—there are ways to make it manageable, but only if someone knows to plan for them.

What Happens After My MRI?

A radiologist—a physician who reads imaging for a living—reviews the scan and writes a report. Your treating doctor gets that report, and at your next visit you’ll hear what it showed and what the doctor wants to do about it: therapy, injections, a specialist referral, sometimes surgery, sometimes “nothing surgical here” and a different plan entirely.

Ask for a copy of the report. It’s yours to have, and you should keep it with your growing file. But before you read it—and especially before you read it at eleven at night with a search engine open—let me tell you what those reports sound like.

Radiology reports describe everything the camera sees, and on most adults past their twenties the camera sees plenty: bulges, narrowing, fraying, and the phrase that launches a thousand insurance arguments—“degenerative changes.” Those two words show up on the scans of people who feel perfectly fine, and insurers lean on them hard to argue your problem is age, not work. That fight has its own article: what “degenerative changes” on your MRI actually means. Read it before you let that phrase scare you.

I’ve Seen This Before In my nursing years I learned something that took the mystery out of imaging for me: the scan and the patient don’t always agree. I’ve seen dramatic-looking films on people who were back at work in a month, and modest-looking films on people who could no longer lift their grandchildren. The MRI shows structure. It does not show pain, weakness, endurance, or what happens to you at hour nine of a ten-hour shift. Function is its own fact, and it gets proven the old-fashioned way—by consistent, honest reporting to your doctors over time.

A diagnosis is not a price tag.

I want to be blunt about this because I watch people do it constantly: they get the report, search the scariest phrase in it, and start mentally spending a settlement—or grieving one. The words on an MRI report don’t decide what a claim is worth, in either direction. A herniated disc on film is the beginning of a medical conversation, not the end of a legal one. If your scan does show a disc injury, our back injury workers’ comp page covers how those claims are built. What matters over the life of your claim is the whole picture: what treatment you need, how you recover, and what you can and can’t do when the dust settles.

So after the MRI, your job stays boring and steady: go to the follow-up, understand the plan, ask what the findings mean for you rather than for some hypothetical spine, and keep your copy of the report in your file. If the next sentence out of the doctor’s mouth involves the word “surgery,” take a breath—that’s the next article.