Why do we take medicine to suppress symptoms like coughing, fever, etc. when those are our bodies way of fighting infection?

Question

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

Answer 1

People mentioning overcompensation, which is often true (for example, fevers are better at killing bacteria but some viruses give fevers).

But also the body also often sacrifices long term in favor of the short term. And nowadays we have modern medicine if things get serious so for relatively minor things (common viral infections) it’s best to mitigate those long term sacrifices (things like inflammation)