Fever Is Part Of Your Immune Response

If you respect your immune system, you must realize that your thermoregulatory center is an intregal part of your immune system.

When your body is under attack by a virus or bacteria, your leukocytes release pyrogens to increase your temperature, because your virus fighters work better at a higher temperature and the virus reproduces slower at a higher temperature. Most mammals have this ability to increase body temperature when under attack by pathogens.

Yes, I understand that it makes you feel bad. You are not supposed to feel good. You are sick, you are fighting off invaders, and your body needs to devote all of its energy to doing that. If you feel like you can't move around and you just want to sleep, that is the best thing you can do to help your immune system fight off the infection.

For some reason, there is a widespread belief that if you don't take drugs to lower the fever, your body will just keep raising your temperature until it kills you. That is an odd belief. Normally, the thermoregulatory center that keeps you at 37c all the time will not raise your temperature enough to harm you. If it can keep you at 37c, it can keep you at 40c. It's not suddenly going to malfunction.

All the years I worked in ER, I only worked with 2 doctors who were willing to go against the grain. Most of them would give antipyretics to children who came in with fevers. Then the kids would get up and run around and the parents would think that we cured them. Send them home with a script for amoxicillin and they thought we were miracle workers,

But, of course, all we were doing was improving the cellular environment for the virus or bacteria, while decreasing the ability of the immune system to fight it off.

We should be teaching our children about how wonderfully complex and well-functioning their bodies are, rather than telling them they are flawed, or "wrong" or need drugs and plastic surgery.

Your thermoregulatory center keeps your body temperature regulated all the time, day after day, year after year. No one ever worries about what kind of job it's doing, or if it is malfunctioning......UNTIL they are under attack and the hypothalamus cranks up the heat, to help your white blood cells function better and to put the heat on viral reproduction.

All of a sudden, people decide that they need to second-guess and micro-manage their hypothalamus. Nope, it doesn't know what it's doing, they decide. What if it gets carried away and cranks the heat too high? Better step in and throw some drugs into the body, to stop its functioning.