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4 Things You Can Go to Urgent Care For

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Your local walk-in medical care clinic may just be one of the best places you don’t know about. It’s the ultimate source for convenient and affordable medical care. Head into a walk-in medical care clinic and you don’t need an appointment, but you won’t be waiting in line for hours like you would at the emergency room. Every year about three million patients visit America’s urgent care clinics. You should also be in your walk-in medical clinic if you need help with any of these:

Routine Medical Exams and Physicals

Your local walk-in medical care clinic is a great and convenient place to get your annual physical, exams for reproductive health or cancer screenings, or even for kids signing up for sports. In many walk-in clinics, you can make appointments, but it’s just as easy to walk in and see one of the 20,000 physicians employed in urgent care locations around America today.

Acute Care for Non-Life Threatening Conditions

Sometimes you really need medical attention quickly, but you don’t have a life-threatening condition that requires a hospital and emergency room. What does this mean? It means if you suspect you’re having a heart attack, the emergency room is for you. If you have a migraine, a bad sprain, the flu, or a respiratory infection, you can get treatment at your local walk-in medical care clinic.

Preventative Care

Not only can you get routine exams like physicals and wellness checks, but your local walk-in urgent care center can also help you and your family stay up-to-date on immunizations, administer booster shots, and help you manage chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease, or problems with the thyroid or gastrointestinal system.

Minor Medical Procedures

Four out of five urgent care centers can take care of minor fractures. Your local walk-in medical care clinic can also help you with lacerations and stitches, lance and drain abscesses, remove certain abnormalities of the skin, or help you deal with warts and skin tags. They can also help you if you have an unfortunate run-in with poison ivy, which is a good thing: 85% of people are allergic to it and it’s found in every state except Hawaii and Alaska.

If you have a cold or the flu, if you need a minor medical procedure done, or even if you just need a physical done and can’t find a convenient time to schedule it in at a doctor’s office, try an urgent care clinic near you.

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A Look at the Life of Someone Who Suffers from Hyperhidrosis

Treatments for hyperhidrosis

There are eight million people in the United States who suffer from hyperhidrosis. These people can sweat as much as four to five times more than other people who do not have this problem. This is considered to be a leading cause of excessive sweating. The most common cause of excessive sweating is referred to as primary focal hyperhidrosis and impacts between 1% and 3% of the general population.

Facts about hyperhidrosis:

  • People who suffer from this usually are healthy and have no other serious medical issues.
  • Because it can cause a decrease in the quality of life for people who suffer from it, it has been called a “silent handicap.”
  • There is some evidence that there may be a genetic component to this condition.
  • Some medications or neurological conditions can cause what is called secondary hyperhidrosis.
  • People who have this may suffer more infections on their skin due to the heavy sweating.
  • There are several hyperhidrosis treatments. These include surgery, injections with Botox, and medications.

The Daily Nation profiled a person who suffers from the condition, Gladys Nijru. She says that this has been a problem for her for as long as she can remember. She says that she was about seven years old when she found other children did not sweat as much as she did. She says the other children were mean to her. To keep her books and area clean, her teachers made her always have a towel and bucket of water, which set her apart from the other kinds her class. They started calling her “the cold one” because her hands were cold all of the time.

When Nijru’s mother took her to a doctor, they were told this was something that she would “grow out of” but she never did. He did not really understand the cause of excessive sweating she was suffering. The teasing she endured made her withdraw and her self-esteem suffered.

Because Nijru experiences the sweating from a number of areas of her body including her feet, underarms, and palms, she plans out everything she will do, every day. This change the way she selects the clothes she will wear and never wears white. It is also hard for her to wear open-toed shoes. Any open shoes have a tendency to slide off her wet feet. On the other hand, closed shoes can give her feet a bad odor. This makes her uncomfortable going to other people’s homes.

While she is not sure what her cause of excessive sweating is, it has had an impact of just about every part of their lives. When she graduated from high school, she wanted to go to college and eventually become a lawyer. She changed her mind and went, instead, into environmental science because the idea of spending all of her time inside and working with papers seemed like an unpleasant idea. She has just started her sophomore year in college. She studies at Kenyatta University.

For Nijru, dating is also a challenge. She hates having to tell people about the cause of excessive sweating that she has to deal with. She also finds it unpleasant to hold hands with someone she is dating.

Recently, Nijru found a support group in her area called “Hyperhidrosis Awareness andndash; The Perfect Imperfection.” It was founded and is run by Martin Kiman, whom Nijru met by accident. Before she found this group, her main way to deal with her sweating constantly was to just keep to herself. It has meant a lot to her to talk to other people who have the same problem she does, something she had never done before. She says it was great to meet people who have the same condition but have normal lives.

In addition to going to the support group, Nijru has also found help online where there are a number of forums for people to talk about their problem. Topics discussed are often ways to prevent underarm sweat and the importance of drinking enough water. Hyperhidrosis can often lead to dehydration if care is not taken.

Nijru says, “They are forums where I get to laugh at myself.” She also says she has learned of other treatments and the cause of excessive sweating.

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What You Need to Know About Hair Drug Testing

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More and more companies are using drug and alcohol tests for their current and potential employees. At least 62% of businesses have started to use rapid drug screens and hair follicle drug tests to make sure their workers are safe, they are in full compliance with federal and state regulations, protect their brand’s reputation, and promote a work environment that is free of drugs.

One kind of drug screening that is being used more and more is a hair drug test. While this is not effective at testing for drug usage within the last five days, for that the rapid drug screens will work better, but these tests show drug use over a longer period of time. It takes about five days for drugs to get into the hair shaft but once it is there, it is very hard to get it out.

When you use rapid drug screens, most often these drug test kits look at saliva or urine. There are steps people who know they are going to be tested can take to alter either of these fluids to pass these tests despite using drugs. When you test the hair follicle rather than the other bodily fluids, drugs leave the bloodstream faster as well, you get a more reliable result.

Every day, thousands of companies use hair follicle drug screens to see if their workers are using drugs. Moreover, the results of this kind of testing are so reliable that courts will accept findings and schools use them to make sure their students are not using drugs.

Hair follicle tests are used to screen for a number of illicit and prescription drugs. These include opiates such as codeine, oxycodone, and heroin, as well as marijuana, MDMA (Ecstasy), MEDEA (EVE), PCP, and cocaine.

The time period covered by hair follicle drug screens is a lot longer than for rapid drug screen tests. The time varies for the drug used when you rely on rapid drug screens that analyze saliva or urine. A sample of hair for a follicle test is generally about one and a half inches. The hair should be taken from an area that is close to the scalp. This can show drug use as far back as 90 days.

While the speed with which hair grows varies from person to person, for the most part, it grows about .5 inches each month. Because people’s hair grows at different rates, the testing time frame also varies from person to person. So if two workers ingest one of the substances at the same time, and it was around 80 t0 90 days before your tested their hair, one may pass the test and the other may fail.

Mant companies who want to make sure their employees are not using drugs such as cocaine, opiates, PCP, and methamphetamine wonder if they would be better off using rapid drug screens to test their urine. The problem with that form of testing is that these substances are cleared from the urine fairly quickly. Within three days (72 hours), they are gone. When people use marijuana, many people assume that always stays in a person’s system for a long time but that is not true for the user who does not have a pot habit. For someone who uses once in a while, the chances are good that unless you test soon after their last use, they will pass your test.

The main drawback with hair follicle testing is that it does take some time for the drug to get into the hair shaft. If your worker has used the drug for the first time, or the first time in a long time, when you take the hair and they used within five days, they may pass. It should also be noted that the hair drug test cannot tell you when the person used a substance, just that they did. So, if a worker you just hired failed a drug test, they may have recently stopped so you should talk to them about the drug test results before letting them go.

Addiction to drugs an alcohol is a major, global, health problem. Keeping your workplace drug free is an admirable goal and hair follicle drugs testing can help with that.