Sick or Hurt? Go to an Urgent Care/Emergency Room - Legacy ER

When you fall, get cut, or have a kitchen mishap, or you feel sick all of a sudden, you need one thing: medical help. It’s important to find a place that will treat you right away. In the past, the only option for most of us has been to go to a hospital emergency room. However, now there is the option of going to an urgent care center. Urgent care is a medical clinic that can take care of a wide variety of medical problems. Here’s a look at some of the things that they can offer treatment for.

Injuries and Accidents

Outdoor mishaps and sports injuries are facts of life. Rather than going to an emergency room where the wait can be very long, urgent care will be able to handle these types of injuries and accidents. Lacerations, nosebleeds, muscle strains, and sprains will be diagnosed and treated. An urgent care center will have x-ray services and splints to help with foot, wrist, and back pains, as well.

Seasonal Allergies

Itchy eyes? Sore throat? Headache? Fever? Chills? You might not be suffering from a cold or the flu, it could be that you are experiencing seasonal allergies. A wide variety of tests are available in an urgent care clinic, including blood tests, TB testing, flu/influenza shots. These tests could also help treat insect bites, rashes, poison ivy, ear infections, and other types of skin infections, too.

Headache

A headache is never fun. But if one has experienced a headache all of a sudden, or if it is a sharp, debilitating headache, it is important to seek medical help right away. Going to urgent care is a good option since most of these centers will be able to give the patient an EKG. In the case of a headache, a quick and accurate diagnosis can be a lifesaver.

Infections

Many infections can be diagnosed by a trip to urgent care. Often, infections appear with symptoms that are mysterious and seemingly unrelated. So before an infection becomes more serious, it is best to get diagnosed and treated, which is possible at urgent care. Infections that can be treated include kidney infections, bladder infections, joint infections, urinary tract infections, abdominal pains (which can lead to severe stomach aches), staph infections, strep throat, and even pneumonia.

Chest Pains

Is indeed very scary when chest pains start for no apparent reason. It is important to get medical treatment immediately if one is experiencing chest pains. If it is a long drive to find the nearest emergency room, chest pains can be diagnosed in urgent care. Symptoms occurring with chest pain such as breathing difficulties, wheezing, dizziness, vomiting, etc. will also be taken into account so the patient can be treated efficiently and start to get better as soon as possible.

Recap

The emergency room is certainly still a very vital part of the health care system. But the creation of urgent care centers has helped to reduce the waiting time and overcrowding that emergency rooms have experienced in the past. And the public really does seem to respond very positively to visiting urgent care. In 2015, the Benchmarking Report of the Urgent Care Association of America counted 6,707 Unites States urgent care centers. And in 2016, this same report had a total of 7,357 centers. The growing popularity of urgent care demonstrates that this is a win-win situation for both the American public and for the health care industry.