Some of the most common reasons to visit an emergency room include stomach pain, head pain, chest pain, and fevers.

Why are You Going to the ER?

When you don’t feel good, it can be tempting to hope for the best and wait out the illness or injury at home. After all, the human body is a brilliant machine which is able to heal itself quite often. But when you have a more pressing medical need, you might want to head to the emergency room to find out whether you can indeed handle the medical concern on your own – or if you need an emergency medicine specialist. You are not alone. When you look at the national ER Statistics you see there are millions of visits.

Some of the most common reasons people visit an ER include:

  • Stomach pain – With or without vomiting, stomach pain can be a good reason to head to an emergency room. When you’re not sure what is causing your stomach pain or it becomes localized in your body, you might be dealing with something more complicated than an undercooked piece of meat. Combined with a fever, stomach pain can also be a sign of appendicitis, gallstones, poisoning, ulcers, and other conditions which require medical intervention.
  • Head pain – Those who have migraine headaches can not always get their pain under control on their own, so they require medications to help them manage the pain and the nausea. In other cases, if you have the worst headache of your life, it’s a good idea to head to the ER since that might be a sign of an aneurysm.
  • Chest pain – Heart attacks are on everyone’s minds whenever chest pain happens. While much of the time chest pain is benign, it’s best to have this pain looked at since heart muscle can die quickly during an attack, reducing survival chances with delayed treatment.
  • Fevers – Those families with young children will often go to the emergency room when a little one has a high fever that is not responding to medication. This is a good idea. Fevers are a sign your body is fighting an infection, but in a smaller child, an older adult, or someone with a compromised immune system, they can be a sign that medical help will be needed to control the infection.

Unfortunately, millions of people use the ER for primary medical care.

Injuries For the ER

But illness is not the only reason a person might head to the emergency room. Whether you’re in a car accident or you break your foot trying your kid’s skateboard, accidents happen. You will need to go to the ER if you can see bones coming out of your skin or if you fear that you might have heard a snap when you made that last turn on the dance floor. The medical specialists at the ER will be able to fix the injury and can check to ensure surgery isn’t needed. Stitches are also a common occurrence at an ER.

Many medical needs can be met by urgent care medical centers.

No matter your reasons for heading to the emergency room, it’s a good idea to follow the adage of ‘if it is broke, have someone else fix it.’