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Telehealth is a virtual and remote form of medical care that has been taking hold even before the pandemic began. During the pandemic, it has seen a meteoric rise as it provides doctors with the ability to meet with their patients, provide diagnoses, and prescribe medication from a distance. Without an office visit being involved, doctors have been able to see more patients, maintain sterile practices, and stay safe. This new option for medical care is still on the rise, and it’s unlikely that it will be going anywhere after the pandemic is over.
One of the cornerstones of the rise of Telehealth has been the availability of high-speed internet and video conferencing services. Many medical concerns don’t actually require a visit to the office to get diagnosed and treated but instead can be identified and managed remotely. Not only does this make things easier for the patient being treated, but it prevents further spread of illness by encouraging them to stay home. What other benefits are there to Telehealth?
As Telehealth continues to grow, you can expect to see more and more providers offering it as an option. Imagine it no longer being necessary to leave the comfort of your own home to get treatment when you’re sick. No more do you have to drive yourself or find someone to drive you, to get the care you need when ill. Instead, you just need to pick up a phone and reach out to your medical provider.
The first telehealth services began being offered about fifty years ago, but at that time, the services offered were minimal. As technology has grown and high-speed internet more universal, this field has been seeing substantial growth. Throughout the year’s multiple inventions came and went trying to make this field a reality, and today it’s finally become possible. From patient portals to video conference consultations, the future of telemedicine is here. There is even a growing push to create robotic surgical suites allowing skilled surgeons to treat patients anywhere on the globe that has access to them.
It’s been a long year of virus-ridden pandemic, but with any luck, it’s all slowly coming to a close. It’s too soon to do a victory dance yet, but as things sit, the Vaccine seems to be performing adequately. If the current trend and vaccination schedules continue, we should see a world where the COVID vaccine is under control in just a few months. On the way there, however, there are some questions left for many patients.
We put together a compilation of a number of the most commonly asked questions about COVID to help you manage what is hopefully the last few months of a year-long pandemic.
Those looking to get their vaccination should reach out to their medical provider to get resources. Many doctor’s offices are providing vaccination options, but there are also many vaccination centers springing up at pharmacies and stores across the United States. This is an exciting time for those of us who have lived through the pandemic. With time, patience, and a little luck, we’ll be back to living life close to normal in just a few months.
For many people, the pandemic has been easier to tolerate as the colder months came upon us. The idea of spending this colder part of the year primarily indoors was familiar to us, even if the absence of our distant family through the holidays was not. While this helped with social distancing outside of work and school hours, we still have to concern ourselves with the spread of COVID at our places of employment. With the warmer months ahead, we’re going to feel driven to spend more time outside. While the vaccine is being distributed, caution is still necessary, so we’re going to explore the mechanics of how this disease spreads indoors and out.
With all this talk about social distancing, many have gotten the impression that the primary concern is physical contact. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Social distancing helps reduce the spread of COVID through aerosol behavior, such as through coughing, sneezing, even talking. There is a risk of contact spread, but our masks and the distance we keep are addressing these other venues as well. As a result, keeping airflow moving in your workspace and maintaining ventilation systems is important. The following are a few things suggested by the EPA to address ventilation concerns:
When you’re outdoors, it’s necessary to take the more well-known steps to avoid transmission of the disease. These steps are fairly well-known and include the following:
These steps will help you both indoors and out and can ensure that you and your family stay safe from the life-threatening illness that is the Coronavirus.
We’re entering an exciting part of the pandemic as the vaccine gets introduced. For many of us, this represents a hope of returning to normalcy and a life free from masks… eventually. For now, we’re still finding out how effective this vaccine is and whether it is capable of protecting us from the mutated strains that have been discovered. Recent studies covering the newly produced vaccine are showing promising results, but caution is still necessary. It will be a while, but hopefully, soon, we can start taking steps to go back to something approaching normal. Until officially notified by the CDC, continue to social distance, wear masks, and otherwise take steps to protect you and your family from COVID.
Since the appearance of the COVID-19 virus, face masks have become part of our day to day lives. Considering the important role they play in helping us stay healthy it’s essential that we learn how to properly take care of them. While this may seem a simple concept on the surface, you may be surprised to learn how many people aren’t taking proper care of their masks. They may be reusing the same one over and over again without ever taking the time to clean it, or simply aren’t wearing them properly. This last, typified by those who won’t wear them over their nose, renders them completely ineffective.
Our masks need to be properly cared for so they can continue providing the protection that makes them so valuable. Masks aren’t self-cleaning, nor are they endlessly effective if certain steps aren’t taken to ensure they can keep working. The sad fact is that many people don’t know how to properly care for their masks. If your goal is to see your family safe and intact through the pandemic, consider the following tips when it comes to caring for your mask.
Once you’ve removed your mask, be certain to wash your hands again. After washing your mask, and before wearing it again, make sure that all the filters are in place. You’ll also want to check it for any damage or thin spots in the fabric. If these are present, be certain to discard the mask and choose another one. If you only have two masks left, it’s time to invest in more so you’ll have extras available.
Masks are a big deal, and their role in bringing the pandemic under control cannot be overstated. While wearing a mask can protect you from the disease, they are at their most effective when everyone is wearing them. It’s important that you invest in an actual mask, preferably one with built-in filters. While bandanas and other cloth face coverings offer some protection, they simply aren’t as effective as masks specifically made for the purpose. On a final note, research shows that even severe asthma patients suffer no ill effects from wearing masks.
Situated in our neck is a butterfly-shaped gland known as the thyroid. This important gland is responsible for the production of new proteins and plays a central role in controlling our metabolism. As part of the endocrine system, it is involved with the regulation of almost every organ in our body. Among the many things, it is responsible for is the regulation of cholesterol, our nervous system, calcium levels, our heart, and even the menstrual cycle. This represents just a fraction of the essential tasks our thyroid performs.
There are two common conditions associated with the thyroid, both of which involve irregularities in its activity levels. These conditions can come on as the result of certain medical conditions, age, or genetics. By understanding the symptoms associated with these conditions, treatments can be devised that can correct them. These two conditions are:
The most common methods of diagnosing these conditions are blood tests. By identifying the amount of thyroid hormones in the blood, any irregularities in the functioning of the thyroid can be identified. In some cases, imaging or physical examinations will be done to identify other possible conditions, such as thyroid cancer.
Thankfully treatments are available for both of these conditions, with methodology changing based on the severity of the disease. Given the important role that the thyroid plays in our whole body health, correcting irregularities with this gland is essential to lasting good health. Below are the treatment options available for hyper and hypothyroidism:
If you have any further concerns or questions about these conditions or think that you may be experiencing symptoms related to them, contact your physician. Identification of the condition is the first step on the road to getting the treatment you need for full management or recovery. Treating problems with the thyroid can restore an immense degree of quality of life to patients suffering from it, regardless of age.
Urgent psychiatric care is a currently underdeveloped but fairly new concept within healthcare, as there are many limited resources for this type of service. Urgent psychiatric care, in short, aims to help patients with mental health illnesses by placing mental health services within an urgent care setting. Urgent care groups that offer mental illness treatments usually encompass walk-in visits with social workers and psychiatrists, able to help patients through a mental health crisis. Some researchers have looked into the prevalence of these urgent psychiatric care centers and how their services impact the healthcare industry.
Normally, the rapid deterioration of those with mental illnesses would require hospitalization and ambulatory psychiatric assessment. Still, the delivery of these emergency services often neglects many of the overarching issues of mental health care, including access to services and developing long-term treatment plans for those with conditions such as schizophrenia and depression. Urgent psychiatric services aim to provide rapid access to those assessments and provide short-term treatments, all within an outpatient setting. Urgent care centers that offer mental health services play the intermediary role between community-based services with social workers and psychiatrists and inpatient hospitalization and provide dual roles for preventing the escalations of a mental crisis.
Studies looking into the development of urgent psychiatric services, conducted under The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, provide and review a growing body of literature that describes the interventions and services for psychiatric patients. These care models found over 1400 records of these forms of services, exploring 16 articles describing ten urgent psychiatric programs located in hospitals and throughout Canada. The study found that:
Through this analysis, the study observed a wide-spread absence of urgent psychiatric care and suggested that urgent psychiatric care services require a firm foundation to guide sustainability overtime.
Urgent psychiatric services are highly needed to provide more multidisciplinary approaches to mental health care. These services can help improve emergency and immediate care services to help lower rates of mental health crisis and high-risk patients. While these urgent psychiatric services are currently limited, these services can help establish a new level of care that’s needed for mental health patients who have limited access.
As primary physician clinics deplete and merge with urgent care centers, it has led to increased access for patients requiring medical treatment without going to the ED. For migraine patients, having this access is ever more crucial to improving the healthcare industry and how physicians treat migraines in different settings. For those who suffer intense migraines and cannot wait for their specialty appointment or medication refill, primary-urgent clinics like ours can present to patients a faster alternative. But does primary-urgent care provide better treatment than specialty clinics for migraines?
Meta-Title: How to Wrap Your Head Around Migraines
Meta- Description: If you’re suffering from intense migraines, find out why visiting a primary and urgent care center may be the best options for headache relief.
Many adults who have migraines are often left with an unusual dilemma when learning about treatment options and preventative methods. This dilemma involves what quality of care they will receive, which includes what proper medications are needed to control their migraines and what physicians will be able to provide enough attention to treat and prevent migraines effectively. According to a study reported in Preventative Medicine Reports, these subtleties in pattern and changes in procedures vary, and that preventative measures for migraines often rely heavily on the physician’s expertise and familiarity with migraine treatments.
Throughout the study, migraine-preventative patterns were observed throughout primary and specialty care practices between 2006 and 2009, with patients over 18 included in the study. Over 72% of migraine medications were prescribed by primary care physicians, with the majority of those medications including beta-blockers, antidepressants, and triptans for short term preventions for migraines. On the other, anticonvulsants, triptans were prescribed more by neurologists and psychiatrists. By observing the collective data of these prescriptions, researchers found that while there weren’t any significant differences in prescription patterns for antidepressants and beta-blockers, there were prescription patterns that determined the medication based on the patient’s presence of other conditions, such as depression and hypertension.
At our primary and urgent care center, we can narrow down the selective causes of your migraines by observing your medical history, associated conditions, and other factors and provide instant pain relief. For migraine relief, our clinic works to provide migraine treatment through:
For migraine relief, if we are unable to provide treatment, then we will recommend you to the best specialists in the area to help understand migraine triggers, what may cause your migraines, and medications to better manage them. At MD First Primary & Urgent Care, we’re here for you and can help you with any of your urgent needs.
The rising demand for emergency care services, combined with this year’s Covid-19 pandemic, has led to an increase in emergency crowding, increased costs, pressure on medical staff members, expanded waiting times, and overall less access to healthcare services. Urgent care services have begun to fill in the needs of those suffering from Covid-19 symptoms and those with other chronic health conditions. How people choose to access their health services has drastically changed; telemedicine has created an alternative route for patients not only to continue to be safe during the pandemic but also to have better access to services in urgent scenarios non-covid related.
Many studies have already begun to claim the benefits of urgent care services, where chronic conditions and patients experiencing symptoms can get a faster, ultimately more reliable response from medical professionals. However, because of the drastic changes the Covid-19 pandemic has brought, many patients have begun to choose virtual settings for their illnesses to not only slow the spread but get better access to the services they need. Studies such as those found in the Public Health Emergency COVID-19 Initiative have looked at the rapidly changing environment urgent care centers have faced and found that patients seeking urgent care services throughout the city have helped telemedicine services expand.
According to the study, the impact virtual environments had on an urgent care setting ultimately scaled to manage the volume and influx of more than 17,000 patients within a month throughout the pandemic surge. Within this influx, at least 450 has to be referred to an emergency department, and through multiple providers, found that it minimized the spread during surges. While only 49% of responding patients would have sought care within an emergency room, and 37% preferring in-person urgent care, virtual care urgent platforms have the potential to service over 800 people a day during the pandemic surge and can help patients suffering from chronic conditions receive treatment faster.
Telemedicine has the ability to treat patients on a widespread scale and help evaluate patients for a variety of conditions before being recommended to a local emergency department or specialty center. Urgent care centers with virtual capacity can provide numerous benefits for patients seeking services, such as:
Telemedicine gives providers the ability to screen patients for their symptoms, assess their risk, and provide medical attention by recommending in-person visits and specialty practices to help their pain management. Urgent care centers can have a more interactive setting with their patients, and primary-urgent care practices like ours at MD First Primary & Urgent Care can be here for you.
Since March of this year the world has been going through a harrowing period as COVID-19 spread its way across the country and the globe. A constant stream of information has made it difficult to be certain of which is hype and which is legitimate information. This confusion is made even more difficult as experts postulate on the state of the pandemic, how long it will last, and the dangers involved. In the midst of all this information overload, new data suggests that the pandemic may have a new worrying element to it.
Recent research has revealed a trend in child patients that is leaving experts worried about the repercussions of reopening the schools. Studies have revealed that children who previously carried the disease are remaining capable of spreading the disease for far longer than previously expected. These children, some of which were asymptomatic (without symptoms) to begin with, are still shedding the virus three weeks later. Given that the present quarantine period is set at two weeks, this means that children in states where in-person school has resumed are returning to classes still capable of infecting their schoolmates.
Authorities are responding to this information in different ways, with New York City having opted to hold off in-person classes until October 1st from its initial Sept 20th start date. South Carolina, for its part, opted to maintain an in-person presence for schools, largely returning to a ‘business as usual’ approach. This means that there is a potential for children who are carrying the disease asymptomatically to put their classmates at risk of infection. Thankfully a provision has been included in the state guidelines that allow schools to offer their own virtual education program, though an initial in-person contact with the students is still required. It’s important that you research the rules and guidelines of your local school district to determine what options are available for your child. If you opt to have your child attend in-person classes be sure to emphasize the importance of social distancing, sanitation, and the proper use of masks during this time.
While having your child tested regularly would be ideal until a proper vaccine is developed for COVID, present availability of testing kits makes this unfeasible. Instead it’s important that you limit their potential exposure and ensure they know how to be safe during the pandemic. If your child is beginning to reveal symptoms associated with COVID, including high fever or diarrhea, then it’s time to get them tested. If your child does contract the virus, speak with your physician about having an additional test done at the end of the quarantine period to ensure they’re no longer shedding the virus before returning them to school.
We here at MD First Primary and Urgent Care are dedicated to helping our family of patients remain safe during the Pandemic. If you’d like to educate yourself further on methods of preventing the spread of COVID-19 and protecting your family, call us or visit us today at our offices in Lancaster, SC.
Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and now TikTok have been changing the way that people connect, and information is communicated since their introduction. With all this innovation, however, comes a new risk. Fads used to be fairly local, and only the most pernicious managed to make their way onto the national or even global scene. Now fads can spread at the speed of social media and with them the so-called “challenges” that inspire people to do risky and sometimes outright dangerous things. The latest in the list of challenges that are spreading is the “Benadryl Challenges,” and it could be putting your children at risk.
Challenges are some form of activity that viewers are encouraged to take part in, and in so doing, encourage others to try. Some are relatively harmless or even inspiring, such as food challenges, or makeup challenges, or even exercise challenges. Less benign are challenges that encourage people to do dangerous things, such as the “Tide Pod” challenge. This challenge dared viewers to bite open or even eat Tide detergent pods. Needless to say, the consequences of these types of challenges can be tragic, and parents should keep informed of them so they can talk to their kids about the dangers.
This challenge, as the name suggests, is centered on the allergy medication known as Benadryl, or diphenhydramine. In addition to its intended use for the treatment of allergies, bug bites, rashes, and hives, it has other traits that only occur in high doses. These include altered mental states and hallucinations when taken in sufficient amounts, but these side-effects come with the risk of life-threatening symptoms. Given that the challenge encourages participants to take as many as twelve pills. This is double the maximum daily dosage for those under 12, and equal to that dosage for adults.
The risks of this challenge come in the form of the side effects that come with overdosing. While altered mental states and hallucinations are the desired outcomes, they cannot be reached without putting oneself at risk of the other doses. These include increased heart rate, nausea, dizziness, vomiting, urinary retention, blurred vision, and high body temperature. The most serious potential repercussion is death from seizure, cardiac arrest, arrhythmia, or stroke. A desire to participate in the latest fad “challenge” could result in tragic consequences for the participant and their family.
The best step you as a parent can take is communicating with your children about the risks of this challenge. In the modern environment, there’s no meaningful way to keep your children from hearing about these types of challenges or consuming media that encourage them. While you can limit their exposure at home, internet access is available at schools, libraries, and of course, you can count on their friends sharing their newest favorite internet sensation. This means its essential that you stay abreast of these kinds of changes and establish an open-door policy for talking about them. Be sure to explain the potential repercussions of taking part in the challenge, and trust them to use that information effectively.
Looking for more information about this and other risks that face your children in today’s deeply connected world? Reach out to Dr. Amrendra Kumar or Kasey Hudson at MD First Primary & Urgent Care in Lancaster, SC. They can provide information on these and other social trends that may put your children at risk.