The Case For Urgent Care Centers In The United States

Here in the United States, medical accessibility is not necessarily what it could be. Far too many people (particularly those who are do not have health insurance and those that work low paying jobs) find it difficult to find a general care practitioner. And even more find it difficult to take time off of work to go in and see one. For many people, the emergency room becomes the prime place to get medical treatment of any nature, but this is far from ideal, due to the long wait times and high costs of even the most simple of emergency room visits.

Fortunately, urgent care clinics are providing a viable alternative to medical care all throughout the country, receiving as many as three million visitors on a daily basis. In addition to this, urgent care centers now employ upwards of 20,000 doctors who are both highly skilled and highly trained, providing the convenient medical care that people of all ages, genders, backgrounds, and races need. In fact, the quality of the treatment that you’ll receive at the typical urgent care center is higher than you might realize.

Of course, urgent care locations can treat more minor concerns. For instance, many colds are likely to be seen in the typical medical clinic, as there are up to one billion colds over the course of each and every year here in the United States alone. In addition to this, common infections are treated with ease at urgent care centers.

Urinary tract infections are incredibly prevalent (particularly among sexually active women, due to the fact that women have much shorter urethras than men), with more than eight million cases in a single year. This type of infection is easy to identify, as all it requires is a urine test. For the typical healthy adult, a UTI can be treated with a course of antibiotics, though the doctor will typically want the patient to come in again for a follow up, if only to make sure that the infection really and truly has gone away. If UTIs are recurrent, however, a urologist might need to be seen to get to the root cause of the problem.

In addition to this, ear infections are also frequently treated in urgent care centers. Like urinary tract infections, ear infections target a particular demographic, found predominantly among young children due to the shape of a young child’s skull. For most children, an ear infection is very treatable and will, again, require a simple course of antibiotics. Again, however, recurrent or persistent ear infections might require the expertise of an ENT doctor (ear, nose, and throat doctor), who might suggest the placement of tubes to promote drainage in the child’s ears.

Illnesses can even be prevented at the typical urgent care location, as flu shots are usually readily available before and during the entire duration of flu season. The flu is vicious in winter months, infecting as much as 20% of the population of the United States alone. And while some people think to be just a slightly more serious form of the common cold, this is actually far from the case. In reality, the flu can lead to serious and life threatening complications, particularly for the very young as well as for the very old, populations that die of the flu at much higher rates than the general population of adolescents and healthy adults.

But urgent care centers can also, of course, treat a variety of injuries. In fact, up to 80% of all urgent care locations in the United States are equipped well enough to diagnose and treat fractures, provided that they aren’t too severe. Having a fracture treated at an urgent care location instead of in a hospital might seem a little strange, but it’s an option for medical treatment – and high quality medical treatment, at that – that is likely to save you time as well as money.

After all, the typical urgent care center only has an average wait time of a mere half of an hour or even less, making it absolutely ideal for the person on the go, the person with things to do, every person out there.