What’s the most common reason for people to visit a hospital emergency department? If you watch TV shows like “The Pitt” or “ER,” you might think it’s spectacular injuries related to crashes, shootings, or mass-casualty disasters.
The first episode of “The Pitt” featured a patient with skin stripped off her mangled leg and another with a brain injury suffered in a train accident. Other episodes of the hit series have focused on mercury poisoning and skin blisters caused by citrus juice reacting to sunlight. And a study of a full season of “ER” episodes found that 63.5% of patient visits depicted in the show were due to injury – nearly twice the actual rate in real EDs.
The truth is somewhat less dramatic. A study of 123.4 million treat-and-release visits to emergency departments in the United States in a single year found that the most common “first-listed diagnosis” – the primary symptom or complaint that brought the patient in – is abdominal pain. That was followed by upper respiratory infection and chest pain.
“Abdominal pain” is a broad category that can range from temporary, mild conditions like indigestion and diarrhea to potentially serious problems such as appendicitis, cholecystitis (inflammation of the gallbladder), kidney stones, gastroenteritis, and pancreatitis.
To find out what kinds of abdominal pain send people to the ED, how they’re treated, and what rises to the level of an ED visit, we turned to Gregory Adams, DO, MBA, an assistant professor and assistant medical director at the University of Colorado Anschutz Department of Emergency Medicine. He practices at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital.