Devise A Syphilis Treatment Plan - What To Expect

Clinicians are often challenged with some problems the moment they start the process of coming up with the design of a treatment plan for syphilis. It is a microorganism that causes the condition known as syphilis, and it is called spirochete bacterium. For some reason, this gives many people the impression that treatment of syphilis is quite an uncomplicated process. Sadly, it is quite the opposite. Treatment strategies for this condition takes a lot of work and time since it can be quite tricky. As early as the diagnosis stage, you will find many challenges and obstacles in place, making your road that much trickier. You cannot expect this disease to be presented in a typical manner, as you would other diseases. You are therefore likely to have sweated quite a bit, before arriving at the right diagnosis. True, the microbiological tests that are carried out to diagnose this disease are straightforward enough. However, before these microbiological tests could be conducted, you must first have suspicions that syphilis is behind it. Suspecting syphilis is quite hard because the presentations of the disease do not directly allow one to connect the dots easily. Once you do eventually arrive at a diagnosis, you are likely to face further challenges designing a treatment plan, and those are the challenges we will now proceed to look at.

You will have different patients to treat for this condition. Now the first challenge would be trying to find out how their respective conditions have advanced and what stage they are in. It becomes necessary to figure out how advanced the disease is because, when all is said and done, the appropriate treatment for 'uncomplicated' cases of the disease may not be appropriate for more advanced cases. The uncomplicated cases can be treated with a single dose of penicillin through the intramuscular route. The same medication has to be given through the intravenous route, for some 10 days, when dealing with advanced cases. It is important to make the necessary distinctions among the cases so you'd know which case to administer intravenously or intramuscularly, and which case should be given a single dose and which to give multiple doses. But the line between the easy cases and the complicated ones are blurry at best, making it difficult to make a differentiation.

It is also likely that the syphilis has already done quite a number on the patient. The clinician would find it challenging to find some way to ensure that the damage or the effects could be treated or even reversed. Antibiotics and other medications have been proven to be effective in stopping the disease from going further. However, they do not really address the damage that has been previously meted out. The patients, unfortunately, want them to be treated as well.

The third key challenge that you are likely to encounter, when designing a syphilis treatment plan, is that of figuring out (in advance) how patients are likely to respond to the various treatment courses. It is possible that the patients have an allergic reaction to certain medication. Penicillin, for one. However, it's hard to predict what their allergies would be. You would also have to be prepared with back up plans or alternate treatments in the event that the first ones did not pull through.