Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Delicious Relief from Functional Dyspepsia

A Thai study published in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine concluded that curcumin, a natural compound derived from turmeric, had comparable efficacy to omeprazole in treating functional dyspepsia. Baseline dyspepsia scores were comparable between the groups participating in this randomized, double-blind, controlled trial of 151 patients. They were divided into those receiving curcumin alone, those receiving omeprazole alone, and those receiving curcumin plus omeprazole. Participants in the combination group took two 250 mg curcumin capsules, four times a …

Researchers Develop Mpox Point of Care Test

Last spring, a global outbreak of mpox (formerly known as “monkey pox”) spread to 110 countries. Cases in the United States as of last month have reached a total of 30,767, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, researchers have found that a newly developed point-of-care assay for the rapid detection of the mpox virus has the potential for use in “low-resource and remote settings,” allowing for rapid point-of-care diagnosis. The results …

Parents Accidentally Double Dose Kids’ ADHD Meds

Researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio found a disturbing number of preventable mistakes made by parents and caregivers involving medications given to children for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The most common error (54%) was accidental double dosing. What’s more concerning is that the rate of errors in giving kids ADHD medications has risen significantly over the past two decades. From 2000 through 2021, errors increased by almost 300%. Kids between the ages 6 and …

Loss of Taste or Smell a Less Likely COVID-19 Symptom

Clinical teams are facing some difficulty in distinguishing between COVID-19, allergies, and the common cold this season because some traditional COVID-19 symptoms—such as dry cough and loss of taste or smell—have now become less common. The Zoe COVID Symptom Study in the UK supports this trend, with physicians observing milder disease, mostly concentrated in the upper respiratory tract. Sore throat was often identified as the first noticeable symptom, as reported in an NBC News article. …

COVID Cases Are Up, but New Data Offer Evidence on How to Keep Patients Out of the Hospital

As with all things related to COVID-19, early efforts to treat patients sufficiently to avoid hospitalization had the appearance of throwing the proverbial spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck. Over time, data started to illuminate which approaches offered the most promise. Now, with multiple states tracking a gradual uptick in both positive cases and hospitalizations as fall approaches, new research published in Reviews in Medical Virology supplements existing data showing that nirmatrelvir-ritonavir (Paxlovid) …

Years After Infection, Patients Are Grappling with New COVID-Related Disability. Be Vigilant

As long as 2 years after recovering from COVID-19, some patients who were healthy before becoming infected now experience blood clots, diabetes, neurological complications, fatigue, and mental health issues thought to be related to the virus. The authors of research published in the journal Nature measured disability adjusted life years (DALY) in patients who had recovered from COVID-19 or developed long COVID, with each DALY unit reflecting 1 year of healthy life lost due to …

New Regimens, Similar Conclusions for PrEP. Do They Change Anything for Urgent Care?

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force reported 4 years ago that oral preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) reduced the likelihood of HIV infection in adults at increased risk for infection. At the time, offering PrEP in urgent care was a controversial prospect; while there was little debate as to the public health benefits, some UC operators found the complex side-effects profile daunting for a setting largely dedicated to episodic care. Now a meta-analysis of newer PrEP regimens …

Don’t Jump to Conclusions If That BP Reading Seems Off; You Might Want to Check the Equipment

It’s not unusual for patients presenting to urgent care to have elevated blood pressure that doesn’t necessarily indicate that they have hypertension. Even extreme blood pressure may not mean the patient needs to be dispatched to the emergency room. There are any number of possible explanations for high BP reading besides “hypertension” in urgent care patients—pain, anxiety, and stimulant use being just a few. An article just published in JAMA Internal Medicine highlights another possible …

Extreme Heat Calls for Extreme Readiness in the Urgent Care Center

Uncommonly high temperatures this summer have led increasing numbers of patients to seek care for heat-related conditions at hospitals and urgent care centers across the country. Even in Florida, where people are prepared for extreme heat, emergency room and urgent care operators say they’re seeing more patients with symptoms of heat stroke, heat exhaustion, and other conditions than in recent years. According to a report from WUSF Public Media in Orlando, urgent care centers in …

Is a Midsummer Bump in COVID-19 Hospitalizations a Harbinger of Another Tough Winter?

The midpoint of summer saw the steepest increase on COVID-19 since December 2022, leading some public health authorities and academics to wonder aloud whether we could see another tripledemic—simultaneous, high rates of COVID, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus—as winter approaches. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hospitalizations for COVID-19 jumped 10.3% in the week ending July 15. Emergency room visits were also up for the week ending July 21. Given …

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