Like, I get that if you have a 102° fever, a fever reduced may knock you down to 100°, but what about if you’ve got a 99° temp? Will it still reduce your temperature?
In: Chemistry
No, but it depends on the type of fever reducer. If you talk about aspirin,it stops the synthesis of some substances that our body was producing to fight off an infection(called prostaglandin),with unwanted effect on hypothalamus. Hypothalamus has an innate “set point” of what an ideal temperature of our body should be. Prostaglandins increase this set point so our body raises its chemical activity to pump up heat production. Aspirin blocks synthesis of prostaglandins,so no increase in set point. You don’t need prostaglandins normally to maintain your set point though, so unless you really really overdose, it won’t be a problem. And even if you do overdose,a fever would be the least of your worries.
Recently had a bad fever and was curious why fevers even occur. AFAIR when a fever happens, our hypothalamus detects a certain toxin in our blood introduced by the infection and raises our internal temp so that white blood cells can be released to fight it. My guess is a fever reducer suppresses the hypothalamus from doing this which means it only prevents an increase in temp and couldn’t really decrease it.
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