Should I visit A&E or skip it?

General Health Q&A
1

29-year-old male, 6 feet tall.

I’m currently leaving the GP’s office. I saw a trainee doctor who wants me to head to A&E for a head CT scan, but I suspect he’s just being overly cautious. I feel like A&E won’t even bother scanning me for this, so the whole trip seems like a waste of time.

About five hours ago, my vision went haywire—I couldn’t read any text, everything was blurry, and I was seeing zig-zags everywhere. It was pretty frightening, but it eventually cleared up, and now I’m stuck with a massive headache. The doctor doesn’t think it’s a stroke; he believes it’s a migraine with aura. Both my mother and sister deal with the same thing. I’m hesitant to go to A&E because I’m almost certain it’s just a migraine and they won’t perform a scan anyway. I don’t have any other ‘red flag’ symptoms. Should I go just for the sake of it? It feels like he’s just covering his bases and there’s a 99% chance they won’t scan me today.

2

One of the realities of being an adult is that you get to weigh your own risks. If you go and it’s just a migraine with aura, the worst outcome is a few hours of wasted time without a scan. If you don’t go and it actually is a stroke, the worst outcome is permanent brain damage or death.

The fact that your immediate family has a history of this, combined with the fact that the symptoms resolved and you are young, makes a stroke less probable, though not impossible. I realize the UK system operates differently—in the US, a scan would be a certainty, but we are very litigious here, so doctors practice extremely defensive medicine.