Medical records
Activities of daily living (ADLs)
Activities of daily living are the basic self-care tasks — bathing, dressing, eating, transferring, toileting, continence — that clinicians assess to measure functional independence, and that damages arguments are built from.
Clinicians split the concept in two. Basic ADLs are the self-care fundamentals above. Instrumental ADLs (IADLs) are the independence layer — cooking, cleaning, driving, shopping, managing money and medications. Therapy notes, home-health assessments, and functional-capacity evaluations record both, sometimes as scored indices (Katz, Barthel), more often as prose: “independent with ADLs,” “requires assistance with bathing.”
Why it matters for legal readers
Damages live in function, not diagnosis. Two claimants with identical MRIs diverge entirely on what they can do — and ADL documentation is where that story is told contemporaneously. Plaintiff teams mine it for concrete, jury-legible loss (“could no longer bathe without help for four months”); life-care planners price future assistance from it; and per-diem pain arguments stand on it.
It cuts back just as hard. “Independent with all ADLs” three weeks post-incident is a defense exhibit, and inconsistencies between charted function and claimed limitation — or between the chart and surveillance — are classic impeachment. The deposition question “describe what you can’t do anymore” should never be answered in conflict with the therapy notes.
In the fact record
Functional statements hide in narrative text across many providers. Pulled onto one timeline with citations, the ADL record becomes the damages curve — recovery, plateau, or documented decline.