There are nearly 140 million visits to emergency rooms in the United States each year, and 40 million of these visits are for injuries.
If you’re dealing with your own injury or someone in your family has hurt themselves, you want to know whether you should join these numbers and seek our urgent care.
Since urgent care is one of the core practices here at Forest Urgent Care, our team leaders — Dr. Waiho Lum and Dr. Ping Wong— want to share some rules of thumb when it comes to seeking help for your injury.
Let’s start with an injury that leads to bleeding. Under normal circumstances, your body jumps into action to stop the bleeding by forming a clot. You can help this initial wound healing by applying pressure to the wound, which will help stem the bleeding long enough for the clot to form.
If the bleeding doesn’t stop after 10 minutes, we want you to come see us. This is a sign that your body can use a little help with wound healing, which we can provide in the form of stitches.
If the wound is spurting blood, this is an emergency, as you have hit an artery and need to seek medical care right away.
If you’re able to stop the bleeding and your injury begins to heal, we want you to be on the lookout for infection. Some of the more common signs of infection include:
These symptoms all point to infection, which needs to be contained as quickly as possible because infections like to spread.
One of the more common urgent care injuries we see at our practice are minor sprains and breaks, such as sprained ankles and broken toes and fingers.
With these types of musculoskeletal injuries, we want you to apply the RICE method straight away:
If the injury doesn’t improve after 24 hours of RICE and it’s too painful to use the joint (or whatever body part), it’s time for a higher standard of care at our urgent care center.
Some pain after an injury is par for the course, but if you’re in a lot of pain or the pain doesn't subside after a day or two, it’s a good idea to have us take a look. Often, prolonged pain is your body’s way of signaling a larger problem, and it’s a good idea to heed this call.
If you have a condition like diabetes or peripheral artery disease and you injure yourself, please err on the side of caution and come see us. These types of conditions can make even small wounds problematic, so urgent care is paramount for avoiding slow-healing wounds and larger infections.
If you’re at all unsure about whether your injury can benefit from urgent care, it’s a good idea to have us check it out, just to be on the safe side.
For more guidance on urgent care for your injury, please contact us at our New York City office in Forest Hills, Queens. You can also visit our clinic during our hours of operation, which are Monday through Friday from 8am to 7pm and Saturdays and Sundays from 10am to 5pm.
