IS OCCASIONAL FEVER NECESSARY? (A topic for discussion/exploration of the research literature.)

Let us discuss if fever suppression is necessary beyond the potentially lethal, or if it is harmful.

I experienced yesterday the first bout of fever in about a decade. Having read Antifragile, I wondered if there was a real need to lower it (other than the discomfort) and avoided antipyretic drugs. But it raised an interesting question: if we are made to be subjected to occasional episodes of fever, can we live completely without them? We get mild infections all the time and tend to supress fevers… Now I can understand that the antibacterial benefits of fever can be dealt with with pharma products, but how other benefits, such as thermal variability, or the heating up of the cells?

I cannot ethically report on my own experience (sample of 1) except to intimate that it was not negative (far from it), except for an outpour of bad aphorisms as I was not able to read at all.

Let us go through the medical evidence-based literature, combined with rigorous logic of Jensen’s inequality and nonlinear responses.

via IS OCCASIONAL FEVER NECESSARY? (A topic for… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.