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
I think this is more people don’t like being uncomfortable.
My doctor has always told me to simply ride out and fevers or sicknesses they don’t require me to go to hospital and whilst uncomfortable, I find I recover slightly faster
I have two kids who react differently to fevers. One is extremely miserable when the fever reaches 102, and the other one is acting almost normal, maybe a little tired, at 104.5. So obviously, I will give the first one medicine to reduce his fever as soon as he hits 102 F, but for the second one, I let him ride the fever the first day without medication and usually he recovers much faster.
2 main reasons, either the response is excessive and a net harm or because it’s just too inconvenient for us. We often discourage cough suppressants because they can risk pneumonia developing.
When someone has a cold which they can easily recover from, a doctor might prescribe medications that purely help with the symptoms and let your body handle the rest on its own. Everyone’s already explained overcompensation but whether or not you should suppress a certain symptom also depends on the bigger picture.
For example, there are two types of cough: wet (with sputum) and dry (without). In a patient who is producing sputum, the purpose of coughing is to move the mucus up and out of your lungs to prevent buildup. Giving a cough suppressant to this person would cause all the mucus to build up and fill your lungs and airways, which could trap pathogens and lead to infection. Therefore, you can give them mucolytics to break down the mucus, but you SHOULDN’T give them cough suppressants, you should only give those to patients with a dry cough. This is why cough suppressant bottles are sometimes labeled with “dry cough”.
Depends on the symptoms and how severe they are.
The simple answer is that there are manageable symptoms that can be suppressed that don’t fully diminish your body’s ability to kill invaders. People resort to these treatments as a way of making it easier on them. However, they certainly do diminish your body’s natural defenses, although it’s hotly debated exactly by how much. Most doctors would tell you to go light on the medicines if you use them, but otherwise you shouldn’t.
Now for the long answer. I’ll try to tread lightly as this is somewhat controversial. The reality is that we take a lot of over-the-counter (OTC) medicine because it’s a multi-billion dollar industry and the advertisements have us convinced they work. The commercials paint a pretty picture, enough misinformation gets spread by word of mouth, and people really believe in the product as if it is some kind of magic. That’s why Tylenol and Aspirin are household names and people believe they do a lot more than they actually do. If you grew up like me, there was no shortage of people that genuinely believed Aspirin was a painkiller. It does not, in fact, work that way. You might be feeling better after taking an aspirin because it reduces inflammation, but you aren’t addressing the root problem, and you never know you might be making it worse.
There are a lot of questionable ethics for all of medicine, and it gets even shadier as you go down the rabbit hole. This isn’t meant to diminish anyone’s experience, though. If it works for you, it works for you. I just want to say that you should be skeptical. Question why you are taking a certain medication, evaluate if it is truly doing what you wanted it to, and do a risk assessment. You probably don’t need it (speaking of OTC medicine specifically, not prescriptions).
There are cases when it’s helpful, like when coughing prevents good sleep or there’s a persistant cough after the cold is over that continually irritates the throat. Or when the fever is too high. But it’s mostly overused.
Sometimes it’s simply because an economic condition means someone feels they can’t afford to miss work, so they’ll suppress symptoms enough to seem relatively normal. Of course, that wouldn’t stop being contagious.
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)
so you can feel better?
It’s degrees. At a minor level, a lot of symptoms of illness are obnoxious or prevent us from living our daily lives. There’s definitely a cultural element there, especially in the U. S., that we don’t have time to be sick.
The more extreme bit is that the body isn’t necessarily the best judge of what to do. With some viruses for example, it’s not the virus that’ll kill you, it’s your body’s response to it that goes overboard in trying to kill the virus. You’d think maybe that the body would know better than to increase your internal temperature above 103 degrees, but no, it will kill you to kill a virus. Your individual systems don’t necessarily work in concert, and will do things like flush your bowels, which in some cases is the right thing to do to get something out of your guts, but could also kill you via dehydration, for example.
because humans dont generally like discomforts and since we have big brains were able to make meds to stop those discomforts. plus high fevers hurt pain wise
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