If you are a clinician and you are planning on designing a syphilis treatment plan, expect to be up against some challenges. Syphilis is caused by the microorganism known as spirochete bacterium. That being the case, one would expect the development of treatment strategies to be a very straightforward affair. But it is actually complicated. Do not expect to have an easy time of designing a treatment plan for syphilis. 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. You cannot expect this disease to be presented in a typical manner, as you would other diseases. The clinician would most likely have a difficult time first before he finally hits the nail on its head and get it right. True, the microbiological tests that are carried out to diagnose this disease are straightforward enough. But you (as a clinician) have to first suspect the disease, in order to be in a position to order those particular microbiological tests.

That's where things become tricky. It is hard to suspect the existence of syphilis just by looking at the symptoms alone. Once the correct diagnosis has been made, the challenge now lies in the design of the treatment plan. That is what we will tackle.

You will be tasked to try to figure out how advanced the disease is in your patient. Now this would be quite a challenge especially if you are dealing with more than one or two patients at one time. Let us say that you have patients in a more advanced stage and other patients that are in the earlier and more simple stages. You cannot expect the same treatment to work for them in the same way. Penicillin, administered through the intramuscular route in a single dose, is often adequate treatment for an uncomplicated case of this disease. That might not work for the advanced cases, though. Intravenous routes would have to be taken, and a single dose would not be enough. Often, it takes as much as 10 days for the whole treatment. 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. The border between the complicated and uncomplicated is not always so clear cut.

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. Curbing the disease into progressing further is easy enough; just use antibiotics or other medications and you're set. But they do not really treat the effects that has already transpired. And yet it is the desire of these patients to fix these problems 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. For example, allergy to penicillin is possible in some patients, and it is hard to foretell which of the patients have this sort of allergy. Even where allergies are identified, it can be hard to figure out alternative ' and equally effective -- courses of treatment.