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
Fever tends to be the nuclear option
It’s useful, until it does harm.
You don’t try to eliminate a fever, you medicate it when it’s doing harm (or at risk of)…. whether that’s making you too restless and achy to sleep (which you also need) or getting high enough to risk harm to your brain function.
And a cough is absolutely supposed to remove the crap that collects in your lungs, but an overzealous cough doesn’t produce much and hurts a lot.
So,.we try to make coughs more productive (with things that soften up and thin out the crap), less necessary (reducing the crap that goes into them from your nose in the first place) and a little gentler/quieter when you need to rest.
Our bodies aren’t that good at discerning what’s helpful and what’s not. They only have certain tools. It’s like that old saying, “when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”… Our bodies only have a hammer.
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