Editor's Note: In this video interview, Elizabeth Carradini, DNP, APRN, CWS shares her research findings surrounding an interesting case of a brown recluse spider bite, part of her poster presented at SAWC Fall in Las Vegas, NV.

© 2024 HMP Global. All Rights Reserved.

Transcript

My name is Elizabeth Carradini. I am a nurse practitioner out of Oklahoma. I recently got my CWS, so that's exciting. I work at a company called Advanced Wound Therapy, and we are a mobile-based wound care company. So we go out to people's homes and provide care for them.

My poster is "Dissecting the Arthropod Assault," primarily brown recluse bites. So in Oklahoma we have a ton of patients that will say that they have a brown recluse bite that they need to be taken care of, and I would say a good 8 out of 10 of them are not true brown recluse bites. They usually end up being something like MRSA or even pyoderma gangrenosum. So I felt like it was important to do some kind of research just to help people differentiate between etiologies of a true brown recluse bite or something else like MRSA.

So on my poster, I followed a case of a gentleman who was actually a retired entomologist. So he actually found the brown recluse that had bitten him, and I just kind of followed his journey and his wound healing process through that. I also found a really interesting mnemonic, it's called NOT RECLUSE, that kind of can help differentiate between the etiology of a proper brown recluse bite and that of a different etiology. However, they don't always present the same way. So the main point of my project, I think, is just to show, to kind of keep an open mind whenever somebody says that they have a brown recluse bite, that you can't always be certain that it really is a brown recluse bite or something like MRSA.

So my primary findings with my poster were that, interestingly enough, my patient that I followed on this poster, some of his presentations did go along with the NOT RECLUSE mnemonic, but some of them did not. So I felt like he was a really good example of how the mnemonic can help providers differentiate between a true brown recluse bite and a different one. But at the same time, it also shows them that they don't always present that way, and you can't always rely on that mnemonic. It really does go to show that if you cannot definitively say that it was a brown recluse, if the patient doesn't have that background in entomology or if they aren’t able to produce the carcass, then you can't really say with a certainty that it is truly a brown recluse bite or not.

I would like the audience to kind of take away from my research that brown recluse won't bite unless they are being crushed or if they're being injured. So I know that a whole lot of people are really afraid of, and I was kind of afraid of spiders also at one time until I did this project. And then I was like, wow, they're actually really shy creatures that they don't want anything really to do with humans, and the only time that they'll bite is if we’re crushing them while we're sleeping or something. So I'm kind of hopeful that maybe people won't be as afraid of them after this.