eli5: If fever is our body’s response to kill an infection, then why do we take medicines like paracetamol that control the fever?

Question

Also, I get that the fever can get really high at some point, which causes other effects, but why is our body not able to control its response to the infection so as to not do more harm with the fever?

In: 59

Answer 1

For a long time medicine didn’t have a lot of nuance when it came to when to medicate and when not to. We gave out antibiotics for anything we thought might be a bacterial infection, we used medication to control any fever, etc.

In more recent years we’ve started being a lot more nuanced about such things, so it’s no longer generally advised to medicate a low-grade fever.