Urgent Care News

Readers of JUCM News may recall that, for the most part, patients have been putting off annual physicals, follow-up exams for chronic conditions, and well-child visits since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the U.S. However, new data from the CDC show that too many patients also avoided care for immediate needs. Over a 10-week period at the start of various state stay-at-home recommendations, 20% fewer patients sought care for what ended up being heart …

A patient presents to your urgent care center with palpitations and neck pain radiating to her jaw. She also has a painful, enlarged thyroid on palpation. Concerns for heart attack and malignancy were ultimately ruled out upon further evaluation in this real-world case published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. The patient, who it was later learned had recently recovered from COVID-19, was found to have subacute thyroiditis (SAT), presumed to have stemmed …

Several drugs (and even, dangerously, household cleaning products) have been put forth as possible preventive or curative agents for COVID-19. They’ve all been discredited for that purpose, ultimately, so far. Now, however, researchers in the UK are suggesting that a commonly used glucocorticosteroid may hold some promise. As part of the Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy (RECOVERY) trial, dexamethasone was shown to reduce death from COVID-19 by one third in ventilated patients and by one …

U.S. poison control centers have seen calls related to cleaning products and disinfectants jump 20% in the first quarter of 2020 compared with 2019, according to data posted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly two-thirds of exposures have been related to bleach, while hand sanitizers and nonalcoholic disinfectants are each at the root of roughly one-third of the calls, each. (The data could reflect exposure to multiple chemicals for any one event.) …

When COVID-19 first came to widespread attention, it appeared that the virus was not high-risk for children compared with (especially older) adults. While that may be true in the strictest sense, as more cases have come to light and been the subject of scrutiny it’s become clear that the associated novel multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) can have a severe impact on children. Now the journal Gastroenterology has published data revealing that gastrointestinal signs …

Because COVID-19 is a novel virus that was at first dismissed as a problem unlikely to affect the U.S., only to spread very quickly once it reached our borders, the healthcare system was largely caught off unprepared to prevent the virus or treat those afflicted. Urgent care was certainly no different. It hasn’t taken long for our industry to start catching up, though. In concert with the American College of Emergency Physicians, the College of …