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Every adult knows that feeling in the pit of their stomach when it comes to contemplating the financial repercussions of getting professional medical help. Now, in the case of a true emergency, it’s always clear cut – call 911 or go to the emergency room. Emergency medicine stands as a no-brainer for anyone who needs truly life-saving procedures and should be engaged without delay in any kind of emergency. However, for situations that aren’t necessarily considered an emergency, the concept of whether to go to the hospital can be a real dilemma.
When it comes to non-emergency procedures the question of where to go for medical help can be a little complicated. The simple truth is that medical procedures of any kind simply are not cheap. Whether you are going to the doctor, visiting an outpatient clinic, or hitting up local urgent care, like the urgent care Lexington ky, it can be a hard decision to make.
The first, and most important question, is which facility has the resources that you need. When it comes to your health, while finances certainly are an important factor, the most important element is always going to be your well-being. Health and wellness are one of the most important things that a person can invest in.
While a medical professional should always be consulted for care or concerns, most people can relate to the stress of figuring out how to make finances work with their suspected medical situation. The real challenge comes from trying to understand the severity of a situation.
This can be especially true when it comes to needing an x-ray. If you have been wondering how to know whether or not you should go to the emergency room for an x-ray, or another facility like an urgent care, here is everything you need to know!
When Should You Go to the Emergency Room
One of the best ways to help get clarity on when you should go to an urgent care, is by defining when you should absolutely go to an emergency room. The importance of defining this aspect of the process first is that an emergency room and the services it provides are designed with life-saving measures. There are a lot of benefits to urgent care that will be discussed below, but urgent care is not meant to treat life-threatening conditions.
If you need an x-ray that is the result of intense trauma, such as a rollover car wreck or falling from a height that is greater than 20 feet, seek immediately emergency medical attention.
Why is this the case? The truth about the human body is that it is incredibly good at compensating and this can be the case even in light of life-threatening trauma. If you or a loved one has sustained critical trauma, you could be in need of emergency medical attention even without ‘feeling’ like you need it. For example, there could be hairline fractures in vertebrates that would constitute a broken back or even compounded injuries that your body could be compensating for. In the case of critical trauma, never just assume that because you ‘feel’ okay you shouldn’t seek immediate emergency medical attention.
But what about other non-emergency cases for an x-ray?
The Benefit of Getting An X-Ray at an Urgent Care
So what are the use cases when going to an urgent care might be more beneficial than going to an emergency room for an x-ray? The truth is, anyone can visit an emergency room for any reason they want including getting access to an x-ray treatment. While the x-ray itself has to be ordered by a physician who has to agree that this is the best course of action, the downside to an emergency room is that they are notoriously expensive.
Even for people who have health coverage, the deductible has to be taken into account. The use case for urgent care as a viable option for an x-ray is that the situation itself was not emergent. For example, if your hand or foot sustained some kind of injury that caused you to suspect a fracture, but you were fairly confident that the nature of the trauma didn’t warrant emergency treatment, urgent care could be a great option.
Conclusion
In the case of non-emergency events, urgent care is a great choice for a couple of key reasons. First off, the price of an urgent care x-ray will typically always be far more affordable than the price of an ER visit. In an ER visit, the price of the x-ray is factored into the total cost of the visit which can be substantially higher than the cost of a visit to urgent care.
Another factor to take into account is the fact that urgent care may be the more timely option. In an ER, a triage service determines the placement of patients in the queue to see a physician. In urgent care, it’s a first-come-first-serve system. If you go to an ER with a non-emergent need for an x-ray, you will automatically be placed below any emergencies regardless of whether you came to the ER before them.
So if you are confident that it is not an emergency situation, and you want to gain potentially faster access to a medical professional at a much lower price, consider a local urgent care.