I’m sick rn and I’ve taken medication to reduce my fever. But isn’t a fever your body trying to cook out the infection? Ofc it could cook me as well, but if my fever goes away then won’t that just aid the germs?
In: Biology
Some symptoms can be treated and not harm you while recovering from say the cold or flu. However it is not to say that there is no harms done. With the flu the fever is part of your bodies reaction to fight the virus. It stimulates various antiviral actions in your body that help fight it. Reducing fever might make the flu last a bit longer but not enough to suffer through fevers for most people. But for rare people bringing down the fever might have adverse affects. These would typically be people most vulnerable to worse illness like the elderly, but I should stress that is really rare.
Same thing with cough. The purpose of that is to expel the excess fluids out of the lungs. Not getting that out could in rare, very rare instances potentially make things worse with a bacterial infection perhaps. This would be for drugs that reduce cough like opioids but don’t reduce fluids in the longs. Other drugs help prevent the fluid build up so we have our cake and eat it too without much issue.
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