From sports injuries to ear infections and beyond, urgent care locations are treating all kinds of medical concerns all throughout the United States. For a great many people, these medical concerns are those that need medical attention – and the local urgent care center can often provide the best outlet for that. In fact, a walk in clinic can present as the only viable option in some cases.
For one thing, urgent care clinics are simply more widespread than ever before, with more than 7,000 of them found all throughout the United States by the time that we had reached the year of 2016. In the few years that have followed since, this number has only continued to grow. After all, more than 20,000 doctors are now employed at such medical clinics – and it’s a good thing too, as up to three million people will visit an urgent care medical clinic over the course of just one week.
For many people, urgent care centers provide a viable alternative to the local emergency room. Unfortunately, far too many people think that if their family doctor’s office is closed, they have no choice but to take a medical concern to an emergency room. And the emergency room, while certainly the place to go for a true medical emergency, is certainly less than ideal for lesser medical concerns. For instance, the average emergency room has an incredibly long waiting period for non emergent patients, spanning, on average, for at least one hour – if not even longer than that, for that matter.
And most cases seen in emergency rooms – up to 65% of them, as a matter of fact – could have instead been treated with relative ease in a local urgent care clinic. After all, the average walk in clinic found in the United States will actually be able to treat more than 95% of all the cases that they see. This goes to show that urgent care centers are often much more competent and well equipped for injuries like sports injuries than many of us give them credit for.
As a matter of fact, most sports injuries – barring those sports injuries that might be considered life threatening – can be treated at a medical walk in clinic. After all, up to 80% of all walk in clinics are actually even able to provide the diagnosis and treatment of fractures, something that might be necessary in a good deal of sports injuries. In addition to this, sports injuries that have resulted in something such as a sprained ankle can also typically be treated at local urgent care walk in clinics. After all, such medical centers are likely to have good experience in treating such injuries as there are actually as many as 25,000 sprained ankles taking place over the course of just one day – and that’s just within the United States, let alone anywhere else throughout the world.
Aside from the care that can be given to sports injuries, urgent care clinics can treat many things aside from sports injuries as well. For instance, common illnesses will easily be treated at urgent care clinics throughout the country. Consider, for instance, the UTI (urinary tract infection). UTIs are hugely painful, but hugely common as well, with more than eight million of them diagnosed over the course of just one year. And while an untreated UTI can develop larger issues, many people find that their UTI, when caught early enough, is handled quite easily with a simple course of antibiotics, one that can be prescribed by a doctor in any given urgent care setting.
Ultimately, there are many reasons to go to an urgent care center. From sports injuries to illnesses to injuries that have been sustained in other ways, the care that can be offered by doctors are such medical facilities is quite high indeed. And more and more people are attending such facilities than ever, with more than one quarter of the population having gone to an urgent care center over the course of the last two years alone.
