It’s no secret that everyone’s busy these days. Between work and school and kids and church and social clubs and other things, it seems like no one can find a minute to spare.
That’s especially true when it comes to getting sick. With how busy people are these days, people don’t want to be sick and they don’t have the time to be sick. But every flu season, millions of people come down with the flu. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, people slip and fall and scrape themselves and ache and hurt.
When sickness or dizziness or back pain or any number of other common ailments arise, the best option for your health is to visit a walk in medical clinic.
Why visit a walk in medical clinic such as an urgent care? In these fast moving times, when you’re sick you want easy, affordable, quick medical care so you can get back to everyday life. More than three million people across the United States visit urgent care facilities every week and it’s not hard to see why that is. Urgent cares offer fast, quicker treatment and save people from a lot of emergency room visits.
Think about all the cuts, scrapes and other common medical ailments folks deal with on a daily basis. All of those things can be treated at your local walk in medical clinic. As it stands, the average urgent care facility can treat people for sexually transmitted diseases, muscle strain, ear infections, dizziness, sprains, common sports injuries, back pain and many other things.
Different urgent care facilities may offer different services, but what they all can offer is convenient medical care to treat just about anything that’s not life-threatening and do so at more affordable costs. As if that wasn’t enough, urgent care facilities are easy to access and offer more convenient hours. As it stands, many walk in medical clinics are open until 7 p.m. or later (sometimes even 9 p.m.) during the week and are also open on weekends. This makes it easy to stop in to an urgent care, get the treatment you need—wait times are usually only about 15 minutes—and get back to your regular routine.
For non-life-threatening injuries and common, easily-treated symptoms, urgent care centers will save you time, money and a great deal of grief. But before you visit an urgent care, keep the following pros and cons in mind.
- Pro—Convenience: As previously mentioned, today’s Americans are always on the go and for that reason they need convenient medical are. Urgent cares offer that and they’re usually located in easy-to-find spots, making it easy to get access to things like Z-packs and other fast-acting treatments.
- Pro—Cost: Not only do urgent cares offer a wide variety of treatments, but they offer them at affordable prices. This is great news for people on a tight budget. One of the great things about urgent cares is they offer price transparency, which essentially allows patients to see how much different treatments costs before they are treated for anything.
- Con—Deferral to hospital: Before you make a trip anywhere, it may help to do a little bit of self-diagnosis. You don’t want to over-diagnose any symptoms, but essentially what you’re trying to do is take an accurate stock of how you feel. You don’t want to go to an urgent care, only to be deferred to the emergency room.
- Con—Potentially higher costs: While it’s true that urgent cares are beneficial in a variety of ways. But they may end up costing you more money overtime if you come to rely on them too much every time you come down with something like a cold or a little bit of back pain. Sometimes, home remedies are the best remedy and sometimes it’s best to let an illness run its course with over-the-counter medicines.
If you’ve got a life-threatening issue, do what’s best for health and visit the emergency room right away. It does not do well to roll the dice on your health in any way. But for common injuries and ailments, a trip to your local urgent care facility is a good choice for your health.