What Does a Doctor of Contagious Diseases Do?
Most medical conditions are confined to individual patients, but infectious diseases present unique challenges to medical specialists. Infectious diseases hold the potential to spread to others, including caregivers, and cause widespread illness and disruption. Aside from a responsibility to their patients, doctors who specialize in treating infectious diseases oversee a larger responsibility to the community. Their input helps the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monitor and cope with serious contagions.
Most family doctors, internists and pediatricians treat infectious diseases on a regular basis. Ordinary infections don't require a specialist's attention and can typically be easily diagnosed and managed by your regular doctor. However, when infections are unusual, recurrent, life-threatening or difficult to diagnose, a family physician will often refer patients to an infectious diseases specialist, or ID. IDs possess specialized training that gives them a deeper understanding of how the body fights infections, how diseases spread, and how antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals work.
Diagnosis, Treatment and Counseling
The first step in treating patients with infectious conditions is diagnosis. This can be difficult, especially if the symptoms come and go. The specialist might order a range of blood, stool or urine tests, as well as X-rays or other diagnostic procedures. A physical examination or patient interview can detect other potential causes of infection, such as overseas travel or bad food. The root cause of an illness might be a virus, bacteria, fungus and molds or parasites, and the doctor must be skilled at differentiating possible factors. Once a condition is identified, the ID can treat it with antibiotics, antivirals, diet, or medications that simply ease the symptoms. These doctors also sometimes counsel patients on disease avoidance, if they're traveling to areas where infections are prevalent.
Doctors of contagious diseases must collaborate with physicians and other caregivers to meet obligations to both patients and the community. They'll communicate regularly with a patient's personal physician and coordinate care with doctors in a hospital or clinical setting. If a patient's communicable disease poses a threat to caregivers and other patients, the ID must impose appropriate safety measures to protect others in the facility. Physicians are legally required to report incidents of illnesses such as HIV/AIDS and drug-resistant "superbugs," so the Centers for Disease Control can maintain accurate statistics and recognize the potential for wider outbreaks.
Becoming a specialist in infectious diseases takes a number of years. Like other physicians, they begin with four years of undergraduate education and then four years in a medical or osteopathic college. After graduation, they must complete a three-year residency in internal medicine. During that time, they'll learn clinical and diagnostic skills by treating patients with a wide range of medical conditions, often including infectious diseases. After passing the American Board of Internal Medicine's certification exams, those who want to specialize in infectious diseases must spend another two to three years training in an ID fellowship. Becoming a board-certified specialist requires passing another set of board exams.
- Infectious Disease Society of America: What is an Infectious Disease Specialist?
- American College of Physicians: Infectious Disease
- Mayo Clinic: Infectious Diseases
- University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine: Topics -- Communicable Diseases
- Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis: Internal Medicine
Fred Decker is a trained chef and certified food-safety trainer. Decker wrote for the Saint John, New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal, and has been published in Canada's Hospitality and Foodservice magazine. He's held positions selling computers, insurance and mutual funds, and was educated at Memorial University of Newfoundland and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.