What’s the Healthiest Way to Work with Fever?

There are times when you find that the way you have been approaching things, even if it is by doing exactly what you were instructed to do, is backwards. I remember vividly a professor saying in the first week of medical school that “fifty-percent of what we are going to teach you is wrong and will be corrected over time–the problem is that now we don’t know which half.” That was a remarkable admission from a very experienced and seasoned clinician.

I believe that not so many years from now we will recognize that the way we have been working with fever is all wrong. Too often fever is treated as a bad symptom (and yes, you might temporarily feel better if your temperature is lowered), but routine fever treatment blinds us to fever’s essential role as a tool of the immune system. The importance of fever has long been appreciated within anthroposophic medicine, and now it is increasingly confirmed by good, modern, scientific data.

Below are some facts and recommendations that might help shift your thinking a bit.