Title. When I get a fever my muscles often feel achy and restless. What causes this?
In: 56
Because exercise causes the build up of lactic acid in the muscle tissue…it takes a long time fir the body to break down.
When you have a fever, your immune system jumps into action. This reaction causes an increased amount of white blood cells, which leads to inflammation and weakness – called myositis, and joint and muscle pain called – called myalgia. The protein that the body produces to kill the virus, not the virus itself, is what causes the majority of the symptoms you feel while you have an infection.
When you run a fever, your body initiates an inflammatory response to fight off whatever it is making you sick. This inflammatory response can cause aches and pains
Histamines your immune system create in abundance while sick (there are *many*) are inflamatories by nature. You’d feel better if your body let the sickness kill you peacefully, without your immune systems war-like reaction with casualties on both sides. Your body is in it for the win, though… until it doesn’t.
Any sensory stimulus can be converted to a pain signal if the amplitude is high enough. Ie, stroke a patch of skin once might feel nice, stroke it for several days and it will become excruciating. Like Chinese water torture.
For myalgic pain in sickness, your body is recognising a bunch of chemicals that are not usually present in such high volume as pain via chemical receptors.
That fever didn’t come out of nowhere. Your body creates heat by expending energy. The most efficient way of doing that is muscle contraction. Those chills you feel when your fever gets high enough? It’s the same thing as the shivering you’re doing when you’re cold. This is why high fever is usually accompanied by severe aches, pains, and spasms in your leg and arm muscles… They’re tired.
As the other posts mention, the histamines, lactic acid build up (because of muscle work) and general warfare going on in your body aren’t helping with things either.
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