There are many reasons that you might need to seek some form of medical treatment at some point in time. For instance, common illnesses can often require the input of doctors or other medical professionals. While viruses cannot be treated with medication (with the relatively rare exception of the anti viral treatment, such as one that is often prescribed and provided for flu patients – and even then, the anti viral will only diminish the length of the illness and its overall severity, far from eradicating it completely), infections of a bacterial nature very much can. In fact, antibiotics can sometimes provide the only real path towards recovery – and antibiotics can only be prescribed with the aid of a medical professional.
Injury is another common reason to visit your doctor – or at least one of the doctors in your area. Most minor injuries that people sustain will not need much in the ways of medical treatment, but it is better to get it assessed and checked out just in case. In doing so, you reduce the risk greatly of further injuring yourself for a lack of knowing how severe your injury truly was. And for minor injuries that need care but not enough to go to the emergency room, visiting your family doctor or general care practitioner can be the ideal choice, saving you a great deal of time and money alike.
But what do you do when your doctor’s office is closed? Do you just go to the emergency room for a minor concern? For many people, this has long been the answer – and one that is certainly less than ideal. After all, most emergency room locations have long average waiting times for patients who do not have emergency medical conditions and concerns. In addition to this, emergency room visits can be very expensive indeed, costing more than $1,000 for even a visit for a relatively minor issue. Therefore, visiting your local ER is something that you should try to avoid unless you have a serious medical issue or concern.
Fortunately, there are a number of alternatives that can help you to avoid this. For one thing, general practitioners are staying open more often than ever before, the average family doctor now spending over 30 total hours per week just with patients. And now more than 40% of such doctors are working later into the evening than ever before. Some are even opening their offices for a select number of hours during the weekends, something that is certainly hugely beneficial for those who develop a medical issue during those times.
But when your doctor’s office is closed, where should you go? For a great many people, the answer lies in the 24 hour urgent care center, a form of convenient medical care that has grown more popular in recent years. The 24 hour urgent care center now employs more than 20,000 doctors all throughout the country and can provide higher quality care than many people realize. The average 24 hour urgent care center can even provide for things like fracture care. The 24 hour urgent care center can also easily treat the infections discussed above and your average 24 hour urgent care center will provide the on-demand care that so many people are not able to receive in the typical emergency room. After all, the average 24 hour urgent care center will not even have a wait time that exceeds a mere half of an hour, something that most emergency rooms cannot claim to be true for them as well.
Of course, the 24 hour urgent care center is not for everyone and therefore more and more people are seeking the advice of a virtual doctor. The online doctor is becoming more and more trusted, especially when such online doctors are run through the same general practice that the person in question goes into in person as well. After all, the data that has been gathered on the subject has found that more than half of people are willing to take advantage of telemedicine services when it means that they get to speak to their own doctor – or to another doctor who is still connected at the same practice.
