Benefits of Fever Part 1

The normal human body temperature may vary and is affected by factors like eating,exercise,sleeping and time of the day.Our body temperature is usually at its highest around 6 pm and at its lowest at about 3 am.Normal oral body temperature is 98.6°F or 37°C.

Fever is when a human’s body temperature goes above the normal range of 36-37°C(98-100°F).
A fever indicates that our body is fighting against some kind of infection such as simple cold,flu or an ear infection.It is not an illness itself.In fact a fever may do some good to our body.

In practice I often find it very hard to convince the patients and their relatives that,
“nothing bad is going to happen if you don’t treat the fever up to some level .”
At times patients lose their patience if fever rises after hospitalization or after taking prescribed drugs.Their general belief is that if fever comes it means that the drug is not working or the disease is out of control.

So to convince them that fever is not their enemy but in fact fever is our good friend,I have put an article on benefits of fever in waiting hall of our hospital.I am writing here the Benefits of Fever article to reach to the larger number of patients and clarify their myth about fever.

Benefits of fever !!

1. To begin with,it is important to understand that the reason the body creates a fever is that bacteria and viruses can only operate at very specific temperatures so the body increases its own temperature to slow them down.
2. Fever raises the temperature beyond which certain microbes need to reproduce.
3. Fever works as a warning signal to our immune system to go into more aggressive level of cleanup and destruction of harmful substances such as toxins,metabolic waste,infectious agents,and even rogue cancer cells.
4. Human studies shows that people who allow their fever to take its natural course rather than over treating it with fever suppressing drugs (antipyretic) are less infectious or less like to spread the disease  because bacteria or virus is not allowed to  reproduce at higher temperature.Also in such people the severity and the duration of the illness is short and they get better than those who suppress the fever.
5. Allowing fever to take it natural course rather than suppressing it with medications actually decreases person’s risk of cancer.Fever supercharges the immune system so that it can works  aggressively and scavenges the rogue cancer cells which have not yet grown into tumors or full blow cancer.These rogue cancer cells are always present in our body but our body’s healthy defense system keep them from taking root and reproducing out of control.
6. More interferon a natural antiviral and anti-cancer substance is produced in the body during fever which helps block the spread of viruses to the healthy cells.
7. Animal studies have over and over again proved that animals of all kinds are more likely to survive longer and live healthier if they are able to raise their temperature in response to toxins and infections.