Emergency rooms can get busy and crowded relatively quickly. When you go there for treatment, you may find yourself waiting for hours to be seen. In the meantime, you suffer from the illness or injury that brought you there.

Likewise, during busy times of the year, such as flu season, it can be difficult to get an appointment with your primary care doctor. Instead of waiting days to be seen, you can go to an urgent care clinic for treatment. These injuries and illnesses are some that urgent care physicians are capable of addressing for patients.

Strep Throat

If you are a parent of small children, you can appreciate the inconvenience that strep throat can present to your family. Rather than try to get your child in with his or her pediatrician, you can take your child to an urgent care clinic to be swabbed for strep throat.

The urgent care facility can perform a rapid strep test that can give a reliable result quickly. You can find out in minutes if your child has this illness and leave the clinic with a prescription for an antibiotic to make him or her feel better. 

Sprains

A sprain in your muscle, ligament, or tendon can cause immense pain and severely limit your ability to move normally. To have it diagnosed properly and bound, you can seek treatment at an urgent care clinic. 

The urgent care doctor can make sure that you did not break or dislocate a bone. After determining that you suffer from a sprain instead of a more severe injury, the doctor can then wrap your sprain and advise you on how to find comfort from the swelling and pain.

Urinary Tract Infections

Urinary tract infections are also a common ailment that urgent care facilities are capable of treating. At the urgent care clinic, you will be asked to provide a urine sample. The clinic's lab will then test the sample to see if it grows bacteria, indicating that you have an infection. Your urgent care doctor will then prescribe an antibiotic to clear up the infection and ease your discomfort.

These ailments and injuries are some that are commonly treated at an urgent care facility. The urgent care clinic doctor can address sicknesses like strep throat and urinary tract infections. He or she can also properly diagnose a sprain and determine that you do not suffer from a fracture.