Knox Community Hospital offers a broad scope of treatment options for patients with all types of infectious diseases, Dr. Sunil V Bhat, an infectious disease specialist at the hospital told the Mount Vernon News.
“It’s relatively broad in terms of its scope,” Bhat said. “If you’re talking about seeing a patient in the clinic, that could be HIV, chronic hepatitis B or C. But then we’ll also see people referred to us for a variety of things, people who have had fevers for a while and we haven’t been able to figure out what’s wrong with them.”
The clinic also sees people who have been discharged from the hospital and still need some additional care.
“They are not quite better,” Bhat said. “They’re getting there. But they just need an extended course of antibiotics whether it’s for a bone infection, a heart infection, a lung infection. We tend to also manage those, manage the antibiotics, make sure the cure is not worse than the disease.”
The Infectious Diseases department also assists oncology doctors with managing patients who contract a disease while their immune systems are weakened during chemotherapy, Bhat said.
Bhat is also consulted on other types of infections, including those of the skin and bones.
“Usually what happens is that the person gets admitted to the hospital with an infection, but the doctors don’t feel comfortable treating the infection or they think there is something insidious going on, and they contact Infectious Diseases for our input,” Bhat said. “What other tests do we need to run on this person? What kind of treatments would be best? How long are the treatments going to last?
Patients should seek medical attention if they have fever or chills that last for more than a couple of days, Bhat said.
“If you’ve had this fever and you really feel run down, with flu-like symptoms or aches and you just can’t function like you normally do and it’s been going on for a couple of days, you should get somebody to check it out,” the physician said.
You can get a referral to Knox Community Hospital from another physician.
“Or the patient can make an appointment themselves,” Bhat said.
Dr. Bhat’s office is now located at 1661 Venture Drive in Mount Vernon. To schedule an appointment, call 740-326-3535.
