If you’re looking into getting fast and affordable health care for everything from wound repair to flu treatment, consider your local urgent care clinic. For a great many people, the urgent care center has become an important and popular institution. After all, there are now more than 7,000 of them throughout just this on country alone, with more than three million people attending such clinics over the course of just one single week. And with up to 20,000 doctors – if not even more, at this point – working at such clinics, providing everything from flu treatment to infection care in a safe and reliable manner.

Flu treatment has become particularly popular and necessary – especially if you look at any given urgent care location during the winter months. After all, particularly bad flu seasons can leave as much as 20% of the population with the flu at some point. Even in much less severe flu seasons, the flu will still likely infect at least 5% of the population. And while the flu is a virus and cannot be cured, anti viral flu treatment can also be offered at many a medical care clinics like an urgent care near me. Getting this type of flu treatment won’t get rid of your flu, of course, but it can help to shorten the duration of your flu and reduce the risk that you’ll develop any of the severe complications that can be seen alongside the flu.

For many people, the flu can even be prevented before any type of flu treatment is ever really needed. Getting a flu shot is a type of preventative flu treatment that is something that everyone who can should really be getting. After all, the flu shot is not perfect and will not prevent absolutely every flu case, but it will help to improve your chances of staying well. In addition to this, getting the flu shot will help to reduce the chances that you’ll have severe complications from the flu should you still end up contracting it – and can help you to avoid the need for anti viral flu treatment, even. For a great many people, the flu shot is a perfect safe form of flu treatment is well, so much so that it is recommended even for very young children – all those who are above even just a mere six months of age.

Aside from flu treatment, urgent care locations are adept at treating a wide array of injuries as well. For instance, there are as many as 25,000 different ankle sprains occurring throughout the United States over the course of just one day. And while many of these sprains are more minor, larger problems can also develop out of them. But with up to 80% of the urgent care locations and walk in clinics all throughout the country able to treat fractures as well as diagnose them, meaning that you can avoid waiting long periods of time in your local hospital – as well as avoiding the fees that are all too often (nearly always, for that matter) associated with hospital stays. For many people, going to an urgent care center is much more economical than the average emergency room, where a typical visit can cost well over $1,000, sometimes dramatically so. At the end of the day, the typical urgent care visit will cost the average person far less.

And urgent care centers are hugely convenient for many other reasons as well. For instance, they are open very frequently, much more so than the average doctor’s office will be. In fact, the data more than backs up this claim, as it shows that up to 85% of all medical care clinics will be open for at least a few hours every single day of the week. And many of these urgent care locations are actually open for extended hours, earlier in the morning and later into the evenings than the average general care practitioner’s will be. When your doctor’s office is closed, the local urgent care center can provide a viable alternative to the emergency room that is in the area.