How often we treat our patients with antipyretics? If we had a little patience to explain to our patients, the benefit of fever it would be far more worthy than just prescribing one to curb it. Fever is a protective symptom which should not be ignored but not be a cause for panic and treatment. Here is a study to emphasis that a temperature less than 40 degrees is to be just watched and the person just has to rest.

Team@ CMHF

‘For one thing, the temperature depends on the method used to measure it. Secondly, there’s no scientific consensus.’

What is more, everyone’s average core body temperature is different and it fluctuates besides. ‘It’s relatively low early in the morning and can rise by about a degree centigrade as the day progresses

Exercise or stress as well as hormonal processes are factors that can affect body temperature, too. A guideline on what is normal exists nonetheless. For several years, Wilms said, the majority of physicians have held the view that a body temperature — as measured in the anus or ear — exceeding 37.8 degrees centigrade is to be considered a fever.

A fever is not an emergency, but rather a useful and important reaction to a disturbance in the body. Not only is it a sign that the immune system is acting to quell the disturbance, the elevated body temperature is the condition enabling the immune system to do so. ‘Blood flow throughout the body is stepped up and the activity of the body’s police force as well as that of the cells producing antibodies is accelerated,’

Therefore lowering fever is often neither necessary nor advisable. ‘Someone with a fever should definitely take it easy and stay in bed if possible until the fever has subsided. ‘It’s important to drink plenty of fluids to compensate for the loss of fluid through sweating. Fruit-juice spritzers, herbal tea or chicken broth are to be recommended.’

Seeing a doctor
is unnecessary unless additional symptoms are present. ‘Fever must be treated only if there is also a disturbance of consciousness, difficulty breathing, convulsions or pain, or if the patient doesn’t drink anything or the fever is extremely high – over 40 degrees,’

People who decide to take a medication should ask in the pharmacy for the least expensive single-substance preparation from this group of three. The only caveat is that children and adolescents under 15 years of age shouldn’t take ASA.

Ref: http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/health/news/article_1615779.php/Fever-sometimes-best-left-untreated

For: AYSUH & Allopath