You don’t have to be the sort of helicopter mom/attachment parent who doesn’t let the child out of their sight or hearing to get worried when your child injures themselves. Most of us know about medicine only through television shows, and when TV is accurate we still lack context for what we’re seeing, and what it means. Generally speaking we don’t know a lot about medicine, and much of what we know is either wrong or sensationalist. There’s no shame in it, medicine is complex, and for the average parent in a place like Texas (or even an MIT professor) you’re not likely to know a lot about medicine. You know in your heart of hearts that when your kid gets in a bad accident on a bicycle that they generally don’t need to go to the emergency room, but you want them to be checked out. You want to make sure there’s no serious damage and that the cuts get cleaned properly. As such the urgent care clinic is the perfect destination.
You don’t want to sit and wait a day to have the kid go to the doctor, you know they’re most likely just bruised, but it’s worth the time and money to know for sure. Obviously you don’t want to pull the kid into an urgent care clinic every time he or she scrapes a knee or bruises their leg, but if the kid falls down a dirt hill on a bike, it might be worth making sure nothing got broken. Urgent care clinics allow people to be over protective at a lower individual and social cost. By overcrowding and flooding major emergency facilities you potentially endanger lives if resources that could be used on someone with a closed head injury are instead being used to clean cuts and check bruises on a 6 year old.
The decision on taking your child to an urgent care facility is one that is up to the individual parent. Texas is a famously rugged and tough; however, people are considerably more concerned for their children then for their own health. We can more accurately gauge when we need to go to an urgent care clinic than we can with a child. Children can vacillate between stoically tough and screaming at a paper cut. It’s hard to gauge by their reaction. Doctors are less likely to have the same clouding protective instinct as a parent and simply know more about medicine. Urgent care clinics allow us to be protective parents without being obsessively protective parents and tying up major emergency resource.
Austin PRO MED Medical Centers provide experienced medical staff and licensed physicians, as well as lab and x-ray facilities in-house. When in need of prompt emergency care, Austin, TX residents can count on the specialists at any PRO MED Texas Urgent Care Clinic. Learn more at website.
