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
When I’m sick, the best medicine is lots of benadryl & a little Marijuana. That way, I sleep all day & all night. Sleep helps my body get better
Internal medicine physician here.
Fever is not always bad. If not associated with any pain and not severe, you don’t require anti-pyretics. People just do it because it makes them feel like they’re doing something sometimes. We also know now that the fever isn’t needed for most infections.
Your body also has an extremely complex immune system. Fever is part of the primitive response. Primitive response reacts first while the more complex processes ramp up. Macrophages start devouring viruses and bacteria and present pieces of them to T cells. T cells then bind to plasma cells when ramp up their production. It also provides the plasma cell the information it needs to produce antibodies. Antibodies are secreted and attach to the viruses and bacteria. Once they are, “tagged,” the immune system swarms these cells and kills them rapidly. This can take 10-14 days usually. I’ve grossly oversimplified it leaving out numerous cell types, but this is the main process to eliminate infection.
As for taking things to alleviate symptoms. A viral upper respiratory infection causing a cough is just inflammation of the airways. Suppressing the cough with something like dextromethorphan does not delay the dealing process. Ibuprofen for a headache from the flu doesn’t impede the immune response. This logic is generally true for most common infections, but not all infections. You definitely don’t want to take Imodium if you might have C. diff!
This is an area we’ve studied to some degree. Some studies have found that fever suppressing medications prolonged the illness by a small amount, but other studies found that they had no effect. So if there is an effect, it’s small enough that it’s difficult to detect.
The long and short of it is that our bodies are very sophisticated, and some of the things we experience when we’re sick are byproducts of our immune response, but not necessarily essential to the healing process.
Because some reaction is necessary to help. But things like coughing, sore throat, etc. Are often just negative side effects of our body fighting the infection.
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.
I don’t, and your comment explains why not, why would I?
I deal with the fever unless it’s too high. For a cough I do things to soothe my throat.
So that we can still function in a capitalist society. They just mask the most outward symptoms so that you can function at work/in society. Your immune system is still fighting the same fight, those medications just trick your brain into suppressing the “grosser” symptoms so you don’t look sick to those around you.
It’s a classic case of “treatment is symptomatic and supportive.” In other words, those meds only treat the symptoms and make the patient feel comfortable while the immune system does its thing. There really isn’t a test for common colds or the flu, much less really effective treatments (Tamiflu is somewhat effective, as is Paxlovid).
They’re an inconvenience to everyday life. I used to not work and could afford to just take no meds and sleep everything off. That and being younger.
Now, I have work, school, kids, I’m older, and just in general less patience for my body betraying me lol
So, meds to ride it out.
Medicine will make you feel more comfortable when sick so people tend to use it to feel better. I like to avoid using medicine if my fever isn’t too high and try to sleep it off instead. However, almost any infection can cause a high-grade fever, particularly if the body has not been exposed to the pathogen before and has no immunity to it. A high fever (roughly 103 F/39.4 C and higher) can be damaging to body organs and cause brain damage. Therefore, it is necessary to use medicine to lower the fever so this won’t happen. It happens when something called pyrogens, are released either from bacteria or viruses or from destroyed cells of the body, which causes a rise in body temperature.
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