There are many things about sports that are important. There is agility, there is drive. There is toughness, there is strength. There is flexibility. There is passion. There are many things that are important about sports. But one of the most important is having a healthy body. This is where sports physicals come into play.
Sports physicals are examinations in which a person gets the workings of their body looked at. Their body is examined by a doctor or a sports specialist to determine if there are any issues with it. With an athlete, there could be issues following damage to the muscles or lack of repair to the muscles.
There could also be injuries, like ankle sprains and broken bones.
Generally, these issues are looked at in a primary care physician’s office. But that doesn’t always have to be the case. Since the 1980’s there has been a rise in a new kind of medical delivery system, and it is called urgent care. It is many positive qualities to it that make it different than the emergency room and primary care physician.
Urgent care was started in the 1980’s when people just had two options for getting medical care for serious and urgent issues. They could either make an appointment with a primary care physician and try to bear it out. Or they could go to the emergency room and absorb a cost of several hundred dollars (several thousand today).
Urgent care has many statistics associated with it. There are several in the following section. They detail some characteristics about urgent care centers and about illnesses and ailments that are generally treated there. These statistics show that urgent care centers have become popular among the U.S. population.
- The most common diagnosis in an urgent care center was upper respiratory condition, and the most common procedure was wound repair in 2012.
- 3 million patients visit urgent care centers each week.
- At least 85 percent of people are allergic to poison ivy.
- 85% of urgent care centers are open seven days a week.
- There are 20,000 physicians who practice Urgent Care Medicine today.
- Four out of five urgent care centers provide fracture care.
- 25,000 Americans suffer from an ankle sprain each day.
- Between 5% and 20% of Americans come down with the flu each year.
Take a situation at the primary care physician’s office. A person has the flu and it has flared up dramatically overnight. They call to make a same day appointment but can’t get it. They have to schedule an appointment for the next day. Meanwhile, their fever is high, they are losing a lot of fluids, and feel like they are about to pass out.
A person in 1980 would have no choice but to either wait for the appointment or go to the emergency room. Today, that person has the option of going to urgent care. The urgent care center is a walk-in clinic where people receive services as they come in. There’s no need for an appointment.
An urgent care center is also cheaper than the emergency room, which would have been the person’s second option. An emergency room visit today runs into the several thousands without insurance, and hundreds if the person has insurance. Treatment at an urgent care center without insurance would be in the several hundreds, under a hundred with insurance.
There are some terms that are important to know for this article. They are walk in clinic, walk in clinics, walk-in clinics, urgent care clinics, urgent care locations, urgent care location, urgent care treatment, walk-in medical care clinic, walk in urgent care centers, walk in urgent care center, and more.
However, it is possible to get treatment or examinations in an urgent care center that aren’t for immediate and urgent issues. An example are sports physicals. Sports physicals done at urgent care centers would be done by a qualified doctor. The main key is that sports physicals don’t need to be scheduled at an urgent care center.
When it comes to broken bones, fractures, ankle sprains, bruises, and cuts that oftentimes come from playing sports, a person can get them checked out at an urgent care center immediately if they want or whenever they want to, as no appointment has to be scheduled. These are very positive issues for a person.
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