If you’re looking to get medical treatment, finding the right place to get it is not always as easy as one might hope. For one thing, it can be difficult to find a place that is open. When you develop a medical concern when your doctor’s office is closed, you might think that your only alternative is the emergency room. But the emergency is less than ideal for its own reasons. For one thing, it is almost always crowded. In addition to this, emergency room costs can be very high indeed, two strong reasons to avoid an emergency room visit unless you are having a legitimate medical emergency.
Fortunately, there are viable alternatives. Getting the advice of a virtual doctor is becoming, for instance, more and more commonplace. In fact, maybe your own doctor’s office now has access to on-demand care through an online doctor, likely available once office hours are over. After all, more than half of people who would otherwise be wary of getting medical advice in this way said that they would use a virtual health service if it was through their own provider. As more than 60% of people feel that telemedicine providers cannot provide the best care and advice if they don’t have your records, this makes sense. And getting advice from a virtual doctor can merely serve as a stop gap. It can let you know if you need immediate treatment, or if it is a medical concern that can wait until the morning, when you will be able to make a regular doctor’s appointment more likely than not.
If you’re still uncomfortable with virtual health care, you might also consider the nearest 24 hour urgent care center. A typical 24 hour urgent care center will be able to provide convenient medical care for a wide array of medical issues. After all, the average 24 hour urgent care centers found throughout the United States are much more able to provide a vast array of medical services than you might realize. As a matter of fact, up to a full 80% of them are even able to give fracture care to those who need it. Many can place IVs, give stitches, and perform other intensive diagnostic tests as well. Therefore, going to a 24 hour urgent care center has really and truly become a viable alternative to going to just about any given hospital, provided that a true medical emergency is not occurring (though most 24 hour urgent care locations can actually treat, on average, 97% or so of the cases that come their way).
And the popularity of the 24 hour urgent care center and of other such urgent care centers is very much on the rise. Over the course of just one single week, for instance, up to three million people will seek the services of an urgent care location such as the typical 24 hour urgent care center. In addition to this, as many as 20,000 doctors, full certified as medical professionals, staff various 24 hour urgent care clinics and other such urgent care centers all throughout the country. This means that going to a 24 hour urgent care center will provide you with deeply competent medical care, medical care that will help to diagnose the issue at hand – and resolve it. Through going to a 24 hour urgent care center, you are able to get this care while saving time and money alike.
But in some cases, you might just be able to see your regular doctor and not have to go anywhere else. This is due to the fact that many a doctor’s office is extending office hours, sometimes by quite the considerable amount, to say the very least. As a matter of fact, more than 40% of all general care practitioners now actually operate during the evening as well as during weekends, though this availability will certainly vary from medical practice to medical practice. At the end of the day, however, this extra time to get in to go see your doctor is something that has paid off immensely for people throughout the United States, people of all backgrounds and of many differing medical needs.