Do You Need Emergency or Urgent Care for Influenza?

As anyone who has seen the information from January 2013 can attest, the flu train is proving more difficult than every-day this year. A particularly potent injure by stretching of influenza A is spreading around the country and making millions of Americans tired. While this was not an entirely unlooked for outcome (the Centers for Disease Control warned that 2012-2013 would have existence a bad year), many individuals regard been caught off guard. This year's flu mature poses a challenge for those patients who may amazement whether they should rush off to each urgent care or emergency department to aim at treatment.

Emergency departments may be overwhelmed dint of the influx of patients - some of whom genuinely privation care. While the influenza virus without particularizing causes fever, cough, sore throat, material part aches, fatigue, and runny or musty nose, severe complications do occasionally arise in assailable patients. The elderly, those with complicating conditions (diabetes, asthma, and heart disease), and children are every one of at increased risk for serious complications from the flu. In the pair susceptible as well as otherwise strong patients, breathing problems can develop lengthwise with secondary infections such as pneumonitis, ear infections, sinus infections, and the like. A able to endure's body may become so overwhelmed rear fighting off the flu that the immune hypothesis fails to effectively mount a answer to bacteria or other pathogens in the environment. Thus it is not unceasingly the flu itself that sends scores of persons to the ER, but rather the delegate conditions and breathing problems that it engenders.

In inexact, studies have suggested that patients should forbear the emergency room if at total possible unless they are truly suffering life threatening illness or injury. Some estimates prompt that anywhere between 13.7% and 27.1% of unforeseen occasion room visits could safely be directed one and the other to urgent care centers or sell in small quantities clinics [1]. Patients suffering from the flu can both spread the illness to others in the ER or clean up some other bacteria or virus while there. Furthermore, patients without actual emergency conditions take away time that would have existence better spent on truly critical patients (in the same state as those suffering from heart impugn or stroke, for example).

This counsel presents a bit of a conundrum as being flu patients for two reasons. First, one adult who has never experienced the certain influenza virus before might become alarmed by a fever over 103 F, or with the overwhelming fatigue and malaise brought the agency of the flu. Thus some individuals who pure need to wait it out at home and rest place of honor for the ER, fearing their heat is too high or that a thing is terribly wrong. At the like time, the traditional advice to elude any emergency or urgent care supposing that not absolutely necessary may also have the incompatible effect, where a patient who is genuinely very unwell delays care until secondary complications receive become severe.

A good way to touch these two types of patient reactions to the flu is to remember that Influenza symptoms should begin to improve by day 7, and should exist gone by day 10. If, at a single one point during infection with influenza, a uncomplaining cannot breathe, begins gasping for tune, or has a fever over 105 what one does not respond to treatment like Advil or Tylenol, it would exist prudent to seek urgent or sudden care. If illness with symptoms in the same state as severe congestion, fever, headache, or malaise lingers conducive to longer than 10 days, it would subsist wise to visit a family practitioner or other primeval care physician. Sometimes, a patient desire feel much better for two or three days (at the extreme point of what they think is the flu) and therefore suddenly become sick again, often through their fever returning. This commonly happens while a bacterial infection has taken hold.

Patients should keep themselves informed hither and thither the flu and its presence in their area of the country. Helpful information be able to be found on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website available to this place.

References

[1] Weinick R, Burns R, and Mehrotra A. Many necessity department visits could be managed at pressing care centers and retail clinics. Health Affairs 2010;29(9): 1630-1636.