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If Fever Helps Fight Infection, Should I Avoid Fever-Reducing Drugs? (2018)

nytimes.com

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Re: If Fever Helps Fight Infection, Should I Avoid Fever-Reducing Drugs? (2018)

#41

Post by vundercind »

bamboozled wrote: post #40
vundercind wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty much certain that 8-9hrs of sleep per night with a fever reducer and/or decongestant and a little bit of weed is gonna get me better faster than no drugs and getting three or fewer hours of sleep multiple nights in a row. When illnesses get really bad for me it’s usually because they’ve only let me sleep like five total hours in three nights or something like that, due to fever chills or lots of snot and a…

If you have kids, welcome to 5 hours a night for 2 years!

Shift sleeping with a few hours of overlap, and one sleep-in day each on the weekends, meant this was never a major problem for us (three kids). We were getting 7ish most nights even in the worst months (which was really only the first three or so)

Re: If Fever Helps Fight Infection, Should I Avoid Fever-Reducing Drugs? (2018)

#42

Post by bamboozled »

vundercind wrote: post #41
bamboozled wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have kids, welcome to 5 hours a night for 2 years!

Shift sleeping with a few hours of overlap, and one sleep-in day each on the weekends, meant this was never a major problem for us (three kids). We were getting 7ish most nights even in the worst months (which was really only the first three or so)

Did you guys do shift sleeping from day one ? We do it but it took us about a year to get right.

Re: If Fever Helps Fight Infection, Should I Avoid Fever-Reducing Drugs? (2018)

#43

Post by maxerickson »

jjk166 wrote: post #35
pfannkuchen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, that’s interesting. We could look at whether more solitary mammals have less of a fever response. The feature isn’t guaranteed to fall off, of course, but if it did that would be good evidence for this theory. EDIT On the former though I think we’d expect babies to be able to tolerate fever well and they really don’t.

Babies are deliberately fragile - if there is an issue evolution wants to nip it in the bud early rather than wasting years of resources raising someone who is ultimately not going to reach adulthood anyways. This is part of the reason that mortality in the first year is over 14 times higher than in the second year, even in the developed world with modern medical practices. Evolution doesn't care about babies, they a…

Human babies are fragile because of physical limits on gestation time.

Lots of mammals stand up and start doing things literal moments after they are birthed.

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