If the purpose of a fever is to help the body fight an infection why is paracetamol prescribed to bring it down?
In: Biology
The human body causes a fever as an attempt to kill off a virus – the virus cannot cope with high temperatures, so the fever has the effect of killing off the virus. The problem is that the human body doesn’t like high temperatures either, but because we are bigger we can soak up the damage a fever causes for longer than most virus will be able to – ideally killing the virus and returning to normal temperatures before any serious damage is caused.
The problem is that while fevers serve a medical purpose, they are very unpleasant, but do serve as a warning that something is wrong.
To inhibit the fever is much more pleasant for the person, but means the virus won’t be treated as quickly – with less serious problems this means it may take slightly longer to recover fully, but we will feel better throughout this process. In more serious cases we need to inhibit the fever to stop the body from hurting itself, but as this also prevents the fever from treating the virus, we then have to treat that separately with other forms of medicine.
Ultimately, our bodies cause us pain to signal something is wrong – so a sore head may be a sign you are too stressed, or too dehydrated which is causing your body problems, sore muscles signify you have damaged them and they need to recover and so on. So listen to your bodies and fix the underlying problems, rather than just hiding them behind pain killers.
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