| Not necessarily.
Fevers can cause seizures and they can have detrimental effects in paediatric patients. For the bulk of the general population, these painkillers/anti inflammatories are simply symptom relief. For those talking about hyperthermia killing, yes but in almost all those cases the cause is not an infection. In fact, I would say that paracetamol kills a hell of a lot more patients than it actually ‘saves’. A study I have taken to heart is that permissive hyperthermia (up to 40 deg c) in ICU patients has a greater survival than those where fever is treated aggressively. Physiologically, this resonates because high temperatures activate the immune system and raised temperatures are non-optimal for bacterial proliferation; so the immune system is primed by fever; suppressing it can dull immune system response. In fact, malaria was used as a treatment for syphillis in the early parts of the 20th century because high temperatures kill spirochetes. There are also a decent number of case reports of cancers going into remission following fever. However in my quick mobile google then I could only see the following study that demonstrated no advantage for either control of permissive hyperthermia group in ICU patients; so perhaps I was relying on a study that has been superceeded. https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa1508375 |