I read somewhere that the reason our temp rises when we are sick is to help out immune system. if so, why try to lower it
In: Biology
This helps increase immune system activity and decrease viral infection rates, but it’s also dangerous.
Your central nervous system can only function properly in a very narrow temperature range, and keeping it too hot for too long will cause permanent damage.
A low grade fever is a normal part of the immune response, high fevers from an overzealous response to an aggressive infection do more damage than they prevent.
Only excessively high temperatures need to be lowered, as the high temperature can begin to damage the brain. Fevers over 106f are rare, but those are the ones that one needs to worry about.
Some people will try to lower fevers to enhance comfort, but it’s not recommended as it may just prolong the illness.
An ER doctor told me that it is basically impossible to become hyperthermic from a fever alone.
A normal fever doesn’t need to be brought down and has some value because the elevated temperature causes immune responses to function quicker and causes some germs to function worse. However, a very high fever is not a normal response and means that something is going seriously wrong in the body. Excessively high temperatures (over 104 degrees) cause the brain to begin to die, so the temperature needs to be brought down to prevent this.
Up to a point, having a fever is a good thing when you’re fighting an infection as in the case of sepsis (infection in the blood). Many pathogens don’t fare well in even a degree or two of average raised temperature, while your body is much more resilient. It’s still a pretty serious condition on its own, and sepsis is frequently fatal regardless of the not only the body’s attempts to fight it, but with medical intervention.
The problems in general however, start when the fever is too high, or just high for too long. Your body will release something called chaperone molecules that help your proteins fold correctly, but there will still be errors and it’s more energetically expensive. This chaperone molecules also have limits, and past a certain point your body fails on a number of levels.
For one, a lot of what your cells do is interact with, transport, and produce proteins. The function of a protein is determined by its three dimensional structure, and it gets that through a process of folding. This is a process which can go wrong, and heat makes it far more likely to go wrong. Past a certain point critical proteins will start to unfold (denature) as in exposure to cooking methods. Needless to say, this does you no favors.
For another, most fevers are not in response to something like sepsis (outside of admissions in a hospital at least), they’re the result of either the disease-causing organism (pathogen) releasing molecules which cause your body to develop a fever (pyrogens) or an immune response by your body. In the former case the magnitude of the infection can cause a release of these molecules so great that your temperature-regulating system is utterly overwhelmed. In the latter case your body’s inflammatory signaling systems can go haywire, causing runaway inflammation and fever; this is called cytokine storm and it’s a potentially fatal condition. Ebola is often thought to kill as a result of cytokine storm, in humans at least.
So you need to manage a fever, first and foremost by identifying its cause and treating it appropriately. This will inevitably take time, and the sicker the patient the more time it will take. During this time you could develop cardiac problems, your metabolism could be seriously disrupted leading to many bad side effects, and you could suffer lasting brain damage from seizures, even coma or death. As a result with a bad enough fever you treat the infection, modulate the immune system response if necessary/possible, and then just try to bring the temperature down. Alcohol, cold water baths, and even infusions of cold IV fluids can all be used.
tl;dr Unless you’re septic, it isn’t generally helpful for your immune system to suffer under a fever, and it can cause organ damage, damage to the blood, damage to the brain, and even death.
ELI5 – The immune system is like a teenage girl, it tends to overreact and you gotta calm it down a little so it starts acting rationally.
Your insides will start to shut down if they get too hot. Therefore we need to bring temperatures down when they could kill you, and not just kill the things making you sick.
You know what happens to egg whites when you boil eggs? You don’t want that happening to your body.
Fever is caused by chemicals released by your immune system. There is evidence that fevers also enhance immune cell function.
And you are kinda sort of right. Scientifically, the evidence doesn’t strongly point in one direction or another. It has not clearly been shown that letting patients fever is harmful. It also hasn’t been conclusively shown that treating the fever makes patients worse off.
There is some rationale for treating fever. Mostly, it makes people more comfortable. Secondly, it expends less of the body’s energy. You also lose considerably more fluid when you fever than when you don’t. While fever might enhance antimicrobial activity, results have not consistently been shown that letting patients fever makes them get better more quickly or less likely to die from infection.
Having a fever hurts your body but also hurts the pathogen. You just hope it dies before you do.
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