Huh. I don’t know if I’m picking up what they’re putting down here, but it kind of sounds like suppressing fever e.g. with Tylenol would actually be bad for (normal) flu progression.
Lots of people go overboard with this, though, like taking flu reduction medicine with every single cold or using medication to go to work sick. American media seems especially accepting of people taking "flu medicine" over rest and recovery.
This is not specific to America; it's a thing in the entire Western world, and probably beyond. Because it's not like we have any other choice.
There is no slack in the system. Most people can't afford to have more than a few sick days in a year, and they prefer to save those up for when painkillers and cough medicine don't cut it anymore. Same with children, because a sick child staying home is usually equivalent to the parent taking a sick day themselves - either way, they're not at work.
We can talk about media or people going overboard once it becomes acceptable to skip work for a week because of sick kid, or in order to not get everyone in the office sick too.
Sick days are unlimited in my country (and of course don’t count as vacation or similar).
I think this is relatively standard for European countries, though not 100% sure.
--
[0] - Or whoever is backing the free healthcare in your country.
Not to mention, cold is an infectious disease too (it's literally the same disease, just a weaker variant caused by strains that evolved their potency away), it too will spread to other people if they go to work.
“The cold” is actually any of a wide variety of different viral diseases (caused by various forms of rhinovirus, coronavirus [0], and, I think, a few other kinds of viruses), none of which are flu (influenza virus). It is not a less potent flu.
[0] so calling COVID-19 “a bad cold” is correct from a certain point of view, despite being substantively misleading.
Still, my main point holds - you usually can't tell by symptoms alone, whether it's a common cold or a flu. In case you get severe symptoms, by the time you can, you've already been infectious for some time. So either way, the right time to call in sick is when you first notice the early symptoms - stuffy/runny nose, cough, headache, elevated body temperature. But obviously nobody does that, because it would mean calling in sick at random a dozen or more times per year.
Post-lockdown COVID was the only time I know of in the last few decades, and a brief time indeed, when it was socially acceptable to react to potential symptoms at the right time.
By the time someone is able to tell they have "the flu", they should've been on a sick leave for 2-3 days already.
I believe it's true in the USA, but not necessarily in Europe. It's quite normal that you have two infections a year, plus sometimes your kid catches something at a completely different time, so the law protects you in these situations.
You can't just take a legal sick day each time you have a runny nose (good luck finding a doctor that fast), and even if you could, you'd quickly stand out. "Two infections a year" is an average for adults who power through remaining ones with painkillers and cough meds; if they didn't, we'd be talking 5+, probably closer to 10 if they have kindergarten-age kids.
5-10 days of sick leave a year is perfectly normal, because that's how much people need to cover serious infections that cannot be easily powered through with meds.
Basically how I grew up. I took painkillers and throat lozenges in my backpack to school.
I will take what the doctor orders though, to treat illness and conditions though thankfully at this stage there hasn't been many instances. Usually that's antibiotics.
I have an above average tolerance but I think what really helps is pain management techniques, which I believe can help all of us at different times of need. Chronic pain is a bitch, which I have, and not everyone has pain that is reasonably manageable, but even prescribed pain meds are really going to mess with you and I think it is worth avoiding if possible and not inhumane.
I have been told that I have that, but I don't think it feels any less painful. It's not possible to know. I feel I am just a little accepting of it.
Broken femur is almost a different league though.
I think it is important to accept everyone's own experience of their pain though, I have no idea what someone else is feeling even if I have experienced the same event. Their experience and what they feel could be vastly different, our nervous systems behaving vastly different. It is not a morale failing to feel and be affected by pain.
> Fever is a key part of the innate immune system, acting as a protective response to infection by raising the body's temperature. This increase in temperature inhibits the growth of many pathogens, enhances the activity of immune cells like leukocytes, and improves the effectiveness of the adaptive immune response.
My Vietnamese in-laws commonly make a sweat tent to shorten the duration of sickness. I can't say if it works, but it's something I intend to try next time I'm sick.
this is will heat up your body and you get some night sweats, this usually helps reducing the sick time.
I can't say if it actually helps, but its become a ritual for that occasion
Very simplified... It is a suppressor of symptoms like pain and fever which are the bodies way of letting you know something is damaged and killing off unknown foreign bodies respectively.
Suppressing symptoms does not remove the cause and is not a cure.
querez's point is that the sentence is meant to be parsed as:
> pain and fever which are the bodies way of <<letting you know something is damaged>> and <<killing off unknown foreign bodies>> respectively
So the claim is that fever is the body's way of killing off unknown foreign bodies, not the body's way of letting you know something is killing off unknown foreign bodies.
And I would make the point that these two things are not analogous, so they shouldn't be mentioned together in any case. The response to the misstatement that started this subthread was "I think what they're saying here is that you're not just suppressing a symptom, you're suppressing a sickness fighting mechanism", which is exactly right, along with a subsequent statement "Fever isn't just a symptom. It's a defense mechanism. The idea is that use of antipyretic drugs may make the infection worse" and which the misstatement completely muddies. It's weird how some people who didn't even make the misleading misstatement are so desperately trying to defend it for no good reason, while others are rationally pointing out how the statement is off the mark. Even with the edit, the statement serves no purpose, mixing up symptoms like pain that guide us psychologically with autonomic immune system responses.
I will say no more about this dead horse.
kruffalon said something ambiguous, with the intended interpretation (of that ambiguous part) being true and a secondary unintended interpretation being false - both interpretations grammatically valid.
querez tried to clarify the misinterpretation being made, but it looked as though their point was missed so I made it more explicit.
> It's weird how some people who didn't even make the misleading misstatement are so desperately trying to defend it for no good reason
I just saw some confusion so chimed in to try to clear it up. Only motive is that I feel like it's useful in a discussion for people to know what others mean, rather than arguing against a phantom point caused by miscommunication.
I will edit my previous comment to make it more clear.
(Edit: Nvm, I'm not able to edit that comment any more, I've still not understood the edit-function here)
Although, we’re very unusual humans in the grand scheme of things. So using medication might be reasonable. The brain might start taking damage around 104F. That was probably a good tradeoff for a peasant farmer (our ancestors, on average). Most of us nowadays just think for a living, not such a good tradeoff for us. Take the fever suppressant, what’s the worst that’ll happen if you miss an extra day of work?
https://www.seattlechildrens.org/conditions/a-z/fever---myth...
So it would make sense that drugs like tylenol/paracetamol would make you feel better, but would keep the flu alive in you for longer.
There are cases when the fever is dangerously high and antipyretics are necessary. But when the fever is supportable it certainly accelerates the healing.
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/127/3/e20103...
> There is no evidence that children with fever, as opposed to hyperthermia, are at increased risk of adverse outcomes such as brain damage.10,12,24–26 Fever is a common and normal physiologic response that results in an increase in the hypothalamic “set point” in response to endogenous and exogenous pyrogens.12,26 In contrast, hyperthermia is a rare and pathophysiologic response with failure of normal homeostasis (no change in the hypothalamic set point) that results in heat production that exceeds the capability to dissipate heat.12,26 Characteristics of hyperthermia include hot, dry skin and central nervous system dysfunction that results in delirium, convulsions, or coma.26 Hyperthermia should be addressed promptly, because at temperatures above 41°C to 42°C, adverse physiologic effects begin to occur.10,12,27 Studies of health care workers, including physicians, have revealed that most believe that the risk of heat-related adverse outcomes is increased with temperatures above 40°C (104°F), although this belief is not justified.7,26,28–30 A child with a temperature of 40°C (104°F) attributable to a simple febrile illness is quite different from a child with a temperature of 40°C (104°F) attributable to heat stroke.
You cannot get a dangerously high fever. You can get a dangerously high body temperature from heat stroke, or I suppose you could have some rare hypothalmic disease. But fever as an immune response is not dangerous to adults or children.
if I wasn't clear he basically does not get fever that's just it, the body don't do it.
> Fever is used by organisms as diverse as fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals (see for reference Basu and Srivastava, 2003). Since fever is metabolically expensive, it must provide substantial advantage to the host. Surprisingly little is known about immunological effects mediated by fever, a lack of understanding that might be attributable in part to the common ignorance in clinical practice with respect to benefits fever might provide. Post-operative infections can be prolong survival: patients developing empyema after lung cancer surgery have improved 5-year survival (50% (n = 18) vs 22% (n = 411)) (Ruckdeschel et al, 1972). In this light, it seems unfortunate that fever is usually suppressed in hospital routine.
> The phenomenon of spontaneous regression and remission from cancer has been observed by many physicians and was described in hundreds of publications. However, suggestive clues on cause or trigger are sparse and not substantiated by much experimental evidence. [...] At least in a larger fraction of cases a hefty feverish infection is linked with spontaneous regression in time and is investigated as putative trigger.
> Professor Busch in 1868 introduced the infection of cancer patients by purpose as a novel strategy to treat cancer. He achieved a dramatic regression with his first patient using live Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria, the pathogen leading to erysipelas, published in the German Journal ‘Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift’ (Busch, 1868). Beginning in 1891, this strategy was exploited by Coley, who had some reading knowledge of German (Hall, 1998). Coley systematically applied Streptococcus pyogenes extracts – later called ‘Coley’s toxin’ – to cancer patients and achieved a remarkable rate of regressions. A retrospective compilation of cases considered inoperable at the time of treatment between 1891 and 1936, which was conducted by Wiemann and Starnes (1994, Table 2), determined a remission rate of 64% (108/170) and a 5-year survival rate of larger than 44%. Coley used to inject his extract once or twice a week over a period ranging from a few weeks to several months. His method became quite famous and was tested on hundreds of patients by him and contemporary physicians, but overshadowed by the development of X-ray treatment which was regarded to be much more powerful and of broader applicability.
> Since cancer is usually a slowly progressing disease with occasionally long periods of dormancy, putative beneficial fever effects should also precipitate as preventive efficacy. This can indeed be found. In a cohort of 603 melanoma patients compared to 627 population controls, an inverse correlation was found between melanoma risk and number of recorded infections on the one hand and between melanoma risk and fever height on the other hand, leading to a combined reduction of melanoma risk of about 40% for people with a history of three or more infections with high fever above 38.51C (Koelmel et al, 1999). Mastrangelo et al (1998) report a striking inverse correlation between the number of infections and mortality from tumours in Italy in the period 1890 –1960: every 2% reduction in the number of infectious diseases was followed by a 2% increase in tumours about 10 years later.
you're just the tip of the iceberg my friend - did you know "horse dewormer" ivermectin has long been given to humans - for decades - to treat parasitic infections?