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

Fever is a catch all that doesn’t work on everything, so sometimes it just makes you feel worse without doing much, and in that case, taking fever reducers makes a lot of sense. For illnesses that fever does help with, sometimes the thought process is that dragging it out but feeling alright is preferable to recovering quicker but being debilitated while sick