5 Easy Ways to Stay Out of the Emergency Room
My name is Dr. Peter Craig and I am emergency room physician. I admit that even though my patients are my livelihood, I would prefer to see as few of you as possible. I don’t want anyone to have to suffer any kind of medical episode that would require the life-and-death care of the ER.
Emergency medicine is a part of healthcare delivery that will never go away. But one of my jobs as a doctor is to help my patients better understand how they can avoid ER visits in the future. I will treat you when you come into my ER, but I also want you to know how you can avoid making repeat visits.
To that end, I know of five easy ways to stay out of the emergency room:
1. Do Not Ignore Routine Care
I cannot tell you how many times I have seen patients suffering from conditions that could have been avoided had they sought routine care from their primary doctors. Take the typical heart attack. Heart attacks are largely avoidable by simply taking good care of yourself and seeing your primary care physician when you’re not feeling well.
If something is not right, don’t delay seeing your doctor. Make an appointment with the expectation that you might be able to address a minor problem before it becomes a major one.
2. Avoid Drugs and Alcohol
You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating: avoid drugs and alcohol. Statistics show that a growing number of ER visits are directly related to the use of substances ranging from alcohol to painkillers to designer drugs. Stay away from those things. You do not need them anyway.
3. Eat Right and Exercise
Another piece of advice you’ve heard ad nauseam is that of eating right and exercising. We doctors have to keep reminding patients because the message isn’t sinking in. Remember that the body you live in has to be taken care of just like your house, your car, and any other possession you own. Not taking care of it is an open invitation to letting it break down. Your car needs the right fuel to keep running; so does your body. Your house will fall apart if you don’t make the effort to maintain it. Your body works the same way.
4. Eliminate Unnecessary Risks
We see a lot of ER visits as a result of accidents involving high-risk behaviors. I’m not recommending you live your life in a padded room with no windows or doors, but I am suggesting that you not take risks unnecessarily. For example, there is no need to drive 75 mph down a highway with a posted speed limit of 65 mph. Going 10 mph faster is not likely to get you where you’re going that much sooner, but it does increase the likelihood of severe injury or death in the event that an accident occurs.
5. Rearrange Your Home
My last tip is more for senior citizens and parents of small children: rearrange your home to reduce the risks of falling. It turns out that accidental falls at home are at the top of the list for emergency room visits among the two groups of people I mentioned. You can avoid the emergency room by doing simple things like improving the lighting, removing clutter, repairing floors and carpets, etc.
ER patients are my livelihood. However, I would gladly move to another specialty if it were possible to keep people out of the emergency room. Help me help you by heeding the five tips I listed in this post.
