Every illness requires a different level of medical intervention. If every citizen showed up in the emergency room every time you stub your toe, the medical system, as we know it, would collapse. On the flip side, if you refuse to let your kids see a doctor on the grounds of your religious beliefs, no matter how sick they are, you're probably not a very good parent.
It's a good rule of thumb that you should seek medical advice if your condition has worsened in the week since you first started having symptoms. The young woman in this story probably should've sought treatment 3 weeks ago, but her mother keeps trying to stop her. After a week of what was seemingly just a regular cold, she started coughing so hard that it triggered her gag reflex. A week later, she started running a fever and couldn't sleep through the next because of her cough, and even then, her mom forbade her from going to a doctor.
This image is for illustration only, and the subjects are models; the image does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
