Short answer. The change itself does not end your coverage, but it shifts a risk onto you. Article 186 lets the System choose or order a change of physician, and relieves it of liability for any aggravation of your injury or sickness resulting from unauthorised changes of medical services or physicians.
What the law says
shall not be liable for compensation for any aggravation of the employee’s injury or sickness resulting from unauthorized changes by the employee of medical services, appliances, supplies, hospitals, rehabilitation facilities or physicians
Labor Code, Article 186 — System May Change Providers. Read the full provision →
What the exclusion actually removes
Read the exclusion narrowly, because it is drawn narrowly. What is taken away is liability for any aggravation of your injury or sickness resulting from the unauthorised change. It is not a rule that a claim disappears the moment you see a different doctor. Your underlying condition, and the compensation attaching to it, are not what the sentence addresses. What falls outside is the additional harm — the worsening — that the change itself brought about. So the practical question is whether your condition got worse, and whether the switch is what caused that.
The authority the System holds
The first half of the article explains why the exclusion exists. The System has authority to choose or order a change of physician, hospital or rehabilitation facility. Because the System may direct where you are treated, it is not made to answer for the consequences of treatment you arranged around that direction. The word that carries the weight throughout is unauthorized. A change the System sanctioned, or one made at its own instance, is not within the exclusion at all — which is why permission, and evidence of it, is the whole ball game.
Why people change doctors, and what to do instead
Most transfers happen for understandable reasons: the assigned facility is far away, the appointments are slow, the treatment does not seem to be working, or trust has broken down. None of those are unreasonable, and none of them are made better by moving first and explaining afterwards. The safer course is to ask for the change to be authorised and to put the request in writing, so that if it is granted you are outside the exclusion entirely, and if it is refused you know where you stand before your treatment depends on it.
If you have already moved
Do not treat the claim as lost, because the article does not say that. Gather the records from both the original provider and the new one, since the comparison between them is what shows whether the condition worsened at all. Keep any letter, message or note in which you raised the change with the System or your employer, even an informal one, and any reason you were given for the original arrangement being unsuitable. A lawyer reading the two medical files together can tell what, if anything, the exclusion actually reaches in your case.
Related provisions
- Labor Code, Article 186 — System May Change Providers
- Labor Code, Article 185 — Medical Services During Disability
- Labor Code, Article 188 — Refusing Examination Stops Payment