PETOSKEY PERSONAL INJURY ATTORNEY

A personal injury occurs when a person has suffered some form of injury, either physical or psychological, as the result of an accident.

The most common type of personal injury claims are road traffic accidents, accidents at work, highway tripping accidents, assault claims, accidents in the home, and holiday accidents. Indeed, there are a multitude of types of accident and the term personal injury also incorporates medical and dental accidents (which lead to numerous medical and dental negligence claims every year) and conditions which are often classified as industrial disease cases. Industrial disease type cases includes asbestosis and mesothelioma, chest diseases (e.g. emphysema, pneumoconiosis, silicosis, chronic bronchitis, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and chronic obstructive airways disease), vibration white finger, occupational deafness, occupational stress, contact dermititus, and repetitive strain injury cases. Where the accident was not the individuals fault, they may be entitled to compensation. The medical idea of (grievous) bodily harm is more specific than legal ideas of assault or violence in general, and distinct from property damage. It refers to lasting harm done to the body, human or otherwise, although in its legal sense it is exclusively defined as lasting harm done to living human beings. It deliberately does not admit social, ideological, or psychological concepts of violence, but admits forms of property damage that a reasonable person would consider likely to cause lasting bodily harm; e.g., turning off a pacemaker or respirator, or ejecting someone into a cold wilderness in winter with no other source of shelter. Police actions are usually defined as those motivated by reducing bodily harm to "innocent" victims, even if violence or property damage is required to do so. The definition of "innocent" is of course dependent on an ideology or due process of law. In general, police also seek to reduce bodily harm done to suspects as well, although this is a lesser concern, much less in some societies. Doing bodily harm outside the legal process of a given society is usually considered crime, war, or "terrorism", a 20th century term describing various styles of guerrilla and asymmetric warfare. In general, public opinion in the developed world does not support definitions of "war" or "terrorism" that do not refer directly to doing of bodily harm. Systematically reducing, channelling, or eliminating deliberate bodily harm from human public relationships is a major focus of political science. Reduction of accidental bodily harm is a function of engineering that rises to special prominence in safety engineering and biomedical engineering. In many common law jurisdictions, the crime of battery involves an injury or other contact upon the person of another in a manner likely to cause bodily harm.

Battery is often broken down into gradations for the purposes of determining the severity of punishment. For example:

* Simple battery may include any form of non-consensual, harmful or insulting contact, regardless of the injury caused
* Sexual battery may be defined as non-consensual touching of the intimate parts of another
* Family violence battery may be limited in its scope between persons within a certain degree of relationship: statutes with respect to this offense have been enacted in response to increasing awareness of the problem of domestic violence
* Aggravated battery is generally regarded as a serious offense of felony grade, involving the loss of the victim's limb or some other type of permanent disfigurement of the victim. As successor to the common law crime of mayhem, this is sometimes subsumed in the definition of aggravated assault.

In some jurisdictions, battery has recently been constructed to include directing bodily secretions at another person without their permission. In some jurisdictions this automatically is considered aggravated battery.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Personal injury".

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