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
You control fever when it reaches dangerous levels. I’m in Europe thus we measure it in Celsius (don’t really know units in other units). Usual body temperature is 36.5C when you have fever of 38C your immune system is fighting the infection and you can leave it at that. With no complications your body should get healthy on it’s own. But if you have fever of 39-40C then it becomes dangerous and you need to control fever. Here doctors will prescribe paracetamol, but advice to use it only if fever reaches certain thresholds. And essentially you don’t want to remove fever, just to reduce it to manageable level so your immune system can still fight the infection for you.
Also abusing medicine can lead to resistant or even immune bacteria as it can evolve way faster than bigger animals. I remember when I had covid and fever of 40C and my normal body temperature is 35.5C (I’m that cool), with paracetamol it would come down to 39C still miserable, but somewhat more tolerable.
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