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Temperature and Fever

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There are a lot of fun points to cover here so I'm going to do this bullet point style
  • Despite what all of our moms told us, 98.6 degrees is not your normal body temperature.  This number arose about 150 years ago using a machine that took 20 minutes to take a temperature and understandably, our technology and data analyzing ability has improved by leaps and bounds since then.
  • If your body is a car, which is always a great analogy, you know that it's going to be cool when you start driving it and warmer when you're done.  Similarly, your temperature is higher at the end of the day than the beginning.  A normal 6 am temperature is between 96.8-98.9 and a normal 6 pm temperature is 97-99.6.  Usually there's about a 1 degree difference over the course of the day for most people.
  • These numbers are based on oral temperature measurements.  Sadly for most of us, rectal measurements are about the most accurate as they represent closest to your body's core temperature whereas your mouth is more susceptible to changing temperatures due to what you eat and drink and even your breathing.  Temperatures taken under the arm, in the ear, or off of the skin are much less accurate.
  • The phrase "low grade fever" is pretty meaningless based on the above information.  Classically, a "fever" is considered something above 100.4' F (because that's 38 degrees Celsius and we like round numbers) but another good round number is 101.
  • Fever means infection, right?  Most of the time yes but doesn't really distinguish between a virus, bacteria or fungus.  From an evolutionary perspective, we keep our temperature where it's at to limit the ability of fungus to grow on/in us and similarly, at higher temperatures bacteria and viruses usually have more trouble surviving so think of a fever as your natural defense mechanism to invaders.
  • Fever can also be a side effect from a lot of different medicines, most commonly antibiotics.
  • So if fever helps your body rid infections, suppressing a fever should be a bad thing right?  It seems to boil down to this - if you take a medication to lower your temperature, you will feel a little better, but it'll take your body longer to clear the infection.  So what's worse - feeling bad for a slightly shorter amount of time or feeling slightly better for a little longer?  No right answer here but most people take acetaminophen (Tylenol) when they have a fever.
  • What's the deal with "sweating it out" or "when the fever breaks"?  Basically your thermometer gets set from the normal temperature to somewhere between 101-103 and your heater turns on, which means you start shivering.  Shivering is a great way to raise your body temperature with all the muscle contractions.  When you reach whatever the goal is, your thermostat resets to it's natural baseline temperature and then you start sweating because having wet skin helps cool your body down.  Your body will go through cycles of this usually to try to limit the infections ability to keep multiplying while your immune system finds it and kills it off.
  • Finally, there's really no such thing as too high a temperature when you're dealing with infections.  Sometimes kids will get seizures with a fever at the start of an illness, but adults don't.  Your brain is not going to be cooked, as so many people think.  It's a different story if you have an episode of heat stroke, which is not your body naturally developing a fever but rather your temperature being elevated from being exposed to heat for a prolonged period of time, but that is much less common compared to your average person getting sick.
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