There are several considerable challenges that you are likely to encounter when designing a syphilis treatment plan (as a clinician). 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. Unfortunately, that is not the case: developing treatment strategies for this disease can be a very tricky undertaking indeed. It does not even have to reach the treatment stage before the complications start coming in. The diagnosis stage alone brings with it comes challenges. That is because the presentations of syphilis is quite roundabout. There is no short cuts with it. 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. But you cannot think of using these microbiological tests unless you have reason to believe that the condition is actually syphilis. 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. Take, for example, a simple case. All you'd probably need is a single dose of penicillin via the intramuscular route to treat them. For the advanced cases, however, penicillin may have to be administered intravenously, and it must be done for a period of 10 days. 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. It is quite difficult to distinguish the complicated ones from the straightforward ones, though, and that gives a lot of grief to clinicians.
The second key challenge that you are likely to encounter, when designing a syphilis treatment plan, is that of figuring out a way of dealing with the harm already done by the disease. The medications that are available (antibiotics) are very good in terms of curbing the disease's progression. But they tend to do little in terms of addressing the harm already done. Yet the patients expect that to be dealt with too.
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. Even where allergies are identified, it can be hard to figure out alternative ' and equally effective -- courses of treatment. Recommended Links Syphilis Treatment
