If our immune system works best when sleeping, would we get over illnesses faster if we took sleeping pills and slept for three days straight rather than taking it medications? Assuming you stayed hydrated, what would be the downside to “sleep therapy?” It would even slow the spread of illnesses if people just slept for days when they started feeling ill. What is the upside to medicating (medications ranging from cold medicines and fever reducers to antibiotics)?
In: Biology
Doctors often do encourage you to sleep naturally when you get sick, that’s what sick leave is for. So you can stay home and rest.
You shouldn’t just sleep for days though. You need to eat, hydrate, excrete etc. You need to be awake to check if you’re actually getting better or worse. If we just put you under for days, that would require a lot of additional care as you’re intravenously hydrated, fed, catheterized and so on. That’s not really worth it for most ailments that will heal themselves.
On top of that, your body simply can’t fix many things with just sleep. That’s why illness killed so many people before modern medicine. If left untreated, many things will simply kill you or leave you permanently debilitated.
People often abuse antibiotics these days but antibiotics will fix bacterial infections with relative ease that would kill people who just tried to ‘sleep it off’. Bacterial infection was a major cause of death before we discovered antibiotics.
Sleeping it off is great for things that just need time to fix. But putting people to sleep for the duration creates more problems than it fixes. And a lot of things modern medicine deals with can’t simply be slept off.
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