Urgent care centers are on the rise, there is no doubting this fact. After all, more than one quarter of the population has gone to an urgent care location at least once over the course of the past two years. In addition to this, as many as three million people will go to an urgent care clinic within the span of a single week.
After all, with up to 20,000 doctors employed at medical clinics all throughout the country, the typical urgent care center can provide high quality medical care. In fact, up to a full 80% of all urgent care locations are actually able to both diagnose fractures as well as treat them. In addition to this, ankle sprains can also be easily treated at such places – and this is certainly a good thing, as there are up to 25,000 ankle sprains throughout the United States in just one single day.
Other minor injuries can also be treated, from scrapes to more serious cuts. When you get a cut, it is not uncommon to question whether or not stitches are actually needed. Going to an urgent care location near you can help you to determine this – and many an urgent care center or other such walk in clinic will actually be able to perform the stitches, saving you a trip to the emergency room.
Urgent care locations are also able to treat a wide array of common illnesses as well. Flu and cold season brings many patients to such clinics, as it can be hard to determine between the two. After all, there can be as many as one billion colds diagnosed in just one year, as well as up to one fifth of the population contracting the flu (depending on the severity of the flu season that year). If you think you might have the flu, going in to see a doctor is ideal, as anti viral treatments can help to lessen the duration and severity of your illness.
Going into an urgent care center for a flu shot before flu season ever really begins is also a good idea. Most urgent care locations give out flu vaccines, which tend to be highly affordable whether or not you are able to get them covered by insurance. The flu can be a more serious illness than many people realize, especially for those who fall into at risk populations (such as those who are very young, very old, or who have immune systems that are compromised in any way). While a flu shot cannot ever prevent all cases of the flu 100% of the time, getting the flu shot is certainly giving yourself better odds in regards to contacting the flu than NOT getting it. And even if you do catch the flu after getting the flu shot, it will be a much less serious case of it, one that is far less likely to lead to any serious side effects.
Of course, other conditions can also be treated properly in your typical urgent care location. For instance, UTIs are incredibly common, with more than eight billion cases diagnosed throughout a single year. Fortunately, treating the average UTI is quite a simple thing, and only requires a simple course of antibiotics to cure. Therefore, it is something that can easily be treated in the typical walk in urgent care location.
And urgent care locations are ideal for so many other reasons. For one thing, they boast short wait times. Where you’re likely to wait an hour before being seen in the typical emergency room, you’ll likely only wait around half of an hour at the very most in your typical urgent care center. And more than half of all urgent care locations actually have average wait times that don’t even exceed a mere 15 minutes. In comparison to the typical emergency room, the cost of visiting just about any given urgent care center will also be much lower, even though the standards of urgent care treatment are very high, as can be seen in the majority of this article. Therefore, you should seriously consider urgent care centers when you need care.