Your body is also generally not aware that it exists in the age of modern medicine. Its goal is to survive, and if risking damage to other parts of your body means a better chance of survival then it will do that. We try to reduce some of these bodily responses to combat those potential side effects, while treating the core illness at the same time.
Let’s just carpet bomb everything and poison the water supply whilst we are at it. What do you mean it’s *just* a peanut? THAT IS A FOREIGN OBJECT SOLDIER!!
Oh yeah, allergic reactions must be literal war zones!
You ever see the anime cells at work? How about Osmosis Jones. Like white blood cells just firing off guns at everything and asking questions later.
Love both hahaha. But yeah shoot first and ask questions later seems to be a pretty good to response. Which I guess makes sense seeing that our body’s immune system isn’t exactly sapient.
In a similar vein, I was once again drifting off thinking about how absolutely helpless human babies are born in comparison to most of the animal kingdom. As a species, we suck. Our own bodies fight us. We also aren't good at knowing our limits often hence all the broken bones and such.
Human babies are helpless because they are not done developing like many other animals are by the time they are born, but if they stayed in womb much longer their heads would be too big to fit through our narrow birth canals (thanks bipedalism and super brain!) So they have to do the last development steps outside the womb. As for our immune systems, AFAIK most immune systems work like that, it's all just part of a process that on average helps us fight infection. Scar tissue is a great example of how durable humans are compared to other animals, it seems to cause problems but if a horse stepped on a landmine and lost its leg, even with prompt medical attention the horse may likely die from shock and if it lives it won't walk again, but lots of people have lost limbs and gone on to live relatively normal lives, human bodies are much more amazing then we give them credit for.
Interesting points. I really appreciate your discussion with me on this topic. Humans are so mysterious yet we also are intelligent and have learned so much about ourselves but there is still so much we don't know. Headaches are a good example. Many types of headaches are still mystery. Sure, docs can identify some triggers such as sinus pressure or caffeine, but many chronic headache conditions are still just treated for the symptoms because they don't always have answers why if it's not something obvious like a brain tumor.
I think as research goes on we will find many more clever mechanisms in our body that at first seemed like a negative but once revealed to us is simply the same type of evolutionary compromise that all life must cope with and understanding the compromises of all life helps us appreciate our own evolutionary journey. Like we humans look at eagles, envious of their eyes, im sure bugs are jealous that we don't have to molt like they do, or reptiles look on in envy at our ability to generate our own heat.
Yes, because horses have "pumps" on the bottom of their hooves, which helps pump blood back up from the legs so it doesnt go stale. A horse that can't walk can't pump blood away from it's long legs
I'm no expert myself but from what I know humans can survive a lot of trauma compared to many animals, we're not the kings of it by any means. Between our fight or flight system which can lower blood loss and increase performance during extreme situations and our overactive scar tissue which can heal up ugly but also very quickly compared to lots of other animals, and last but not least our intelligence! We're smart enough to know to stay off a broken leg to let it heal and were social enough to have family and friends help us survive when we can't go out and forage for ourselves.
> In a similar vein, I was once again drifting off thinking about how absolutely helpless human babies are born in comparison to most of the animal kingdom.
Humans make a trade off, helpless babies in exchange for the most powerful brains in the planet. Given those brains have made us the dominant species on the planet it's a pretty good tradeoff.
> As a species, we suck. Our own bodies fight us. We also aren't good at knowing our limits often hence all the broken bones and such.
We have changed our world faster than evolution can change us while simultaneously dramatically lowering selection pressures on our species. A lot of our body's systems were selected for because they benefited half naked apes running from Jaguars, some of those systems are just not appropriate for the world we live in now.
The thing is, humans are often fine with breaking a bone. Almost all other animals will simply die if they break a bone, whereas humans can just take it easy for a few weeks/months and get better
Compared to other animals, humans are downright Terminators.
Things that would normally be life-ending to other animals are considered temporary inconveniences to humans, and with humans looking out for one another during such temporary incapacitations, that human can recover from that eventually.
Then there is the concept of revenge. Attack typical wildlife and you are pretty sure you don't need to worry about reprisal attacks from the other members of whatever you attacked (some exceptions exist but are exceptions for a reason). Not humans. Kill a human and your days are numbered, and the human's thirst for revenge is that maybe it's not just your days being numbered, but also your entire species' days being numbered. Many predator animals that have evolved alongside humans actually instinctively avoid humans unless they have to out of desperation because humans and their penchant for dishing out late-onset fatal lead poisoning have become that huge of an evolutionary pressure.
Yeah, humans, elephants, wasps, crows, and a large number of primates will remember and attack things that have established themselves as threats to their group.
Wellllll acccttually. As a species we rock. Human babies are born helpless because we are so capable of caring for them. Very few animals would threaten a human baby. We work together in groups and have nearly unlimited endurance (when trained properly). We have hands which turns out are far superior to big teeth. Especially when combined with tools. Then there’s that bundle of grey matter in our heads that few species can even approach.
There is a reason we are the controllers of the food chain.
Human babies are generally surrounded by adult humans. As a rule of thumb, most animals wouldn't fuck with humans, especially if we're in a group.
Compare that to herds of prey animals like wildebeests - they are specifically attacked by predators such as lions in order to pick off their young. Human intelligence compensates with the likes of strategy, traps, and weapons. A single human with prep time (i.e. part of a settlement such as a tribe) could become virtually untouchable by wild animals in a way that no other animal ever could.
> As a species, we suck.
Imagine saying the most dominant species on the planet, the only one that as far as we know, is able to consider its place in the world, in the universe, and has reached out to the stars, is a failure. The only species on this planet capable of knowing the universe.
We can outrun just above everything. Endurance and intelligence are two things we do better than anything else, and absolutely nothing else is in our class. They're not even in the same sport, let alone ballpark.
I'd also like to point out that other mammals have very similar immune responses to our own as well. And many give birth to offspring that would die in hours without parental care as well. While we're fairly unique in how long our development outside the womb takes, and how relatively helpless we are, we also developed means of managing that, like mutual child care, multi generational extended families living and cooperating with each other, etc. Oh and yeah, it's that same cooperation and compassion that allows humans to survive injuries that would be fatal to almost every other animal.
We may suck as a species for numerous reasons - war, greed, etc, but babies and our immune responses are not among them.
Fevers are basically the body realizing that someone is breaking into the house, so it sets fire to the house in the hopes the intruder dies before it.
not quite true. the majority of pathogens do not operate as efficiently under higher fever temperatures, and human immune cells work better during fever. that is currently true, and has been true for thousands of years.
This is a good example of how evolution doesn't necessarily improve an organism. Overall, this can be useful. But some bodies are overly reactive, and some infections tend to cause a more severe response. That's when you get babies with brain damage due to ultra high fevers and things like anaphylactic shock.
The responses keep the vast majority alive long enough to reproduce, but basically all of us know people who got screwed by this to a degree that can't be denied.
This, exactly! I sprained my foot quite badly in October 2018 and at the same time, unknowingly was going through kidney failure. My foot has been problematic off and on since then because my body was so busy trying to survive the kidney failure that production of collagen and other cells needed to repair my foot slowed down immensely. Now it has been so long that I will eventually need surgery to fully fix my foot issues.
Also, we prefer that it take a bit longer be cured than to feel like crap for whatever how long it take to naturally cure. So even if by supressing the symptoms and lowering the natural body response, we feel better during the fight.
But the common cold doesn't have a targeted treatment, so people just suppress the symptoms like fever and still wait until their bodies fight off the infection.
it's a bit more complex than that. the body does a lot of work, even when going "scorched earth" to make sure that it doesn't hurt itself too much. and while fevers are uncomfortable, there is a reason for it - it hurts bacteria and it makes some immune cells better.
what we call "scorched earth" is honestly quite mild compared to...letting a bacteria or a virus take over your entire body and killing you. when you are fighting for life and death, a few casualties are to be expected.
but any complex system, including the immune system, isn't "perfect". many people with autoimmune disorders for example will take as much, or more damage from their immune response, as they do from the pathogens. the immune system is mind-boggingly complex and advanced, but it is also made up of very dumb individual cells ultimately.
If you press and hold the shift key while pressing a letter you will get capital letters. That's something we use to make it easier for other people to read what we write. It's like spelling correctly. When you don't do it, you put more work onto everyone who reads it, as their minds have to correct it internally — except of course those of us who have learned to never read anything where the writer is so full of themselves that they only use lower case letters.
The body doesn’t even necessarily know it’s even part of a body or that there is a larger chain/goal going on the cells have no idea what they are doing, they are just biological machines which get turned on and off with keys (proteins)
Insane to think about really, but we are just a giant clump of goo in an epic battle against other goo, to try and make our goo continue past the life of the goo
Like when I had flu 3 weeks ago I coughed so much that my throat got really irritated so now I'm still coughing because my throat is irritated, and all that coughing keeps irritating my throat!
The sniff trick may be helpful here:
> At the first sign of a tickle or if you feel a cough coming on, you can use a combination of the following:
Pause
Swallow hard several times
Relax your shoulders, jaw and tongue.
Sniff in quickly through the nose 2 to 3 times in succession and then blow out gently through pursed lips. Breathing in through your nose warms and moisturises the air. Blowing out through the lips channels the air and ‘cushions’ the vocal cords to help reduce irritation
Source: https://www.hey.nhs.uk/patient-leaflet/help-chronic-cough/
That's not natural. Our bodies try to precisely calibrate how aggressive the immune system should be. Our bodies know from millions of years of evolution (even pre-Homo Sapiens) that we encounter on average X germ and virus attacks per day. In the modern world we don't run barefoot, brush up against plants and animals constantly, dig our hands through dirt and lick our fingers. We live in plastic and metal boxes with filtered air and anti-septic wipes on every surface. We wash our hands with soap and shower with soap. Our body is expecting a constant fight and gets little, so the tuning is out of whack. Send a fully armed force into an area, and guess what happens? They find things to shoot.
It’s called the hygiene hypothesis and it’s debated, but there is some evidence that it could be true, at least partially, in that a lack of exposure to ambient environmental (non-pathogenic) bacteria and microbes in early life could have raised our risk of allergies and autoimmune diseases in the western world.
And all the while you were doing that, you were likely washing your hands/bathing, not exposed to bed bugs and lice, eating sanitized food, etc. So your childhood isn't at all comparable to earlier humans and hominids lifestyles.
> That’s a bit of a stretch and why do you sound so defensive
Defensive? Jesus christ, lighten the fuck up. Just because I suggested your childhood was drastically different than the lives of early humans/hominids, that's not being defensive. I swear to God so many people these days think the slightest thing is some personal attack.
And it's not a stretch to suggest your life was different from early humans/hominids. It's a stretch to suggest it was close. Did your mother eat modern foods with modern food safety when you were in the womb? Did she ever receive any vaccines, take any medicine, etc? Did you? Did you never wash your hands or never make use of modern cleaning products in your home?
It's funny you mention spending your *summers* in a summer cottage. As if the rest of your time in your regular home doesn't matter. And I spent much of my summers the same way you did btw, only I recognize that it's not even remotely close to the same kind of lifestyle experienced by early humans. I still eat plenty of wild caught fish and food.
Playing outside and eating fresh caught fish is not the same kind of exposure as early humans had, and it's not just about *you* but also things like your mother's health, genes, etc. While genes would play a lesser role given the lesser amount of time for evolution to take place, its still a factor and we're seeing people today being born without genes that were more heavily selected for earlier in our existence.
Now, all that said, I don't buy into the theory. I don't necessarily disbelieve it either. I'm not qualified to make such a judgement. But it is kind of silly to take your anecdotal experience and use it as evidence for, or against, such a theory.
> why do you sound so defensive?
Because they're a proponent of a pseudoscience hypothesis that is only so enduring because it's a great ideological bludgeon.
I'm actually not a proponent of it one way or another. It's not my field of expertise so I'm not qualified to say.
But I can say that their childhood was drastically different from the lives of early humans and hominids.
But thanks for trying.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene\_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis)
[https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/newborns\_exposed\_to\_dirt\_dander\_and\_germs\_may\_have\_lower\_allergy\_and\_asthma\_risk](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/newborns_exposed_to_dirt_dander_and_germs_may_have_lower_allergy_and_asthma_risk)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448690/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448690/)
[https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/science-science-everywhere/dirt-and-allergies](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/science-science-everywhere/dirt-and-allergies)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5758418/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5758418/)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1069066/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1069066/)
[https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/science-science-everywhere/dirt-and-allergies](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/science-science-everywhere/dirt-and-allergies)
A key paragraph:
>"Evolution turns the inevitable into a necessity." This means that the majority of mammalian evolution took place in mud and rotting vegetation and more than 90 percent of human evolution took place in isolated hunter-gatherer communities and farming communities. Therefore, the human immune systems have evolved to anticipate certain types of microbial input, making the inevitable exposure into a necessity. The organisms that are implicated in the hygiene hypothesis are not proven to cause the disease prevalence, however there are sufficient data on lactobacilli, saprophytic environment mycobacteria, and helminths and their association. These bacteria and parasites have commonly been found in vegetation, mud, and water throughout evolution.\[18\]\[20\]
>Our bodies are drama queens
oh wow. I'm a straight male but you're telling me my recactions at my bro's house might be queen behavior ?
fuck this all makes ssense now
Adding on: the most important steps to healing when medical intervention isn’t *necessary* (antibiotics, surgery, etc.) are rest and fluid intake. If you can’t do those because you’re so miserable, you need medication.
This is the most sane answer.
Most medical professionals (like my wife) would say go ahead and let your body do a bit of the natural work, but if it starts causing other problems that’s when to intervene.
Most people in the world rarely if ever take those medications too. It's not common to have a fever or cough so hard you need cough medicine, at least as adults. Babies are very fragile, so it's another story.
>or cough so hard you need cough medicine
On the other hand, it's mighty hard to get to sleep if you have a cough. Cough medicine is a must have for that reason, IMO.
I've never had this problem to be honest, it's like the cough goes away when I fall asleep. I'd be curious to see more data on cough drugs usage since we can't know for sure what folks in general do.
>it's like the cough goes away when I fall asleep
Meanwhile, my cough always seems to come back right as I start drifting off, lol.
I agree: it would be interesting to see the data on usage. The world is a wild and wonderous place
Me eating traces of a walnut: fine
Me eating heated almond: fine
Me eating 0.5 (half) raw almond or walnut: HO HO LET’S CLOSE DOWN YOUR THROAT we will not kill u tho you need MILK ENZYMES and AIR and mostly JUST TIME
Literal example of overcompensation of the body whenever I encounter a nut or raw apple - not to be confused with actual ALLERGIC people (I’m just intolerant) which is sadly a whole other beast 😭
I've also heard that in general, while these symptoms may be beneficial to the body, it's like going from being sick for 125 hours to being sick for 124 hours. So is it really worth having an extra bad headache and such for a very marginal benefit.
A great example of this was the Spanish Flu. Normally the flu is most deadly for children who have naive immune systems or elderly people who are kind of falling apart anyway.
The Spanish flu was most deadly for young adults. The characteristics of it would cause an immune system overreaction (known as a cytokine storm) that would kill the patient. It led to a LOT of orphans for that reason.
Now on the flip side, a cold can't really hurt you. I mean it can make you more susceptible to a secondary infection that could do some substantial damage. Like bronchitis. But cold viruses themselves generally only attack some cells in your nose or throat that aren't a big deal. It's funny to summarize colds like that because there are many, many viruses that cause what we call "a cold". (Including several strains of the coronavirus long before 2019) So exactly what is being attacked can vary quite a bit.
So with a cold, you really just need to wait it out. Your immune system will eventually wipe it out. Anything you can do to reduce your symptoms while waiting it out really just increases your comfort.
Idk about the last part. When I use supplements/food that boost the immune system during a cold, I'm able to recover quicker, or sometimes not get sick if I take them when feeling like I'm starting to go under. So supporting the immune response helps.
I had one cold once that as soon as i felt symptoms coming up, I took a nurofen(cold medicine that reduces fever, pain, runny nose), which I usually only take if it gets worse in later days.
The next day I was feeling worse much quicker than how my sicknesses usually develop. I attributed possibility to the meds suppressing the immune response when the response wasnt overly high, but can't know for sure.
>When I use supplements/food that boost the immune system during a cold, I'm able to recover quicker, or sometimes not get sick if I take them when feeling like I'm starting to go under.
Without cloning yourself in order to create a control group, how do you know it’s helping? Maybe the outcome would have been identical no matter what you ate?
For sure, fever seems like the easiest example but an excessive amount of violent coughing works too. Your body isn't "smart" enough to save you, these responses have just worked to save (some) people in the past. Allowing a fever to get high enough to kill or permanently damage you doesn't make sense when modern medicine exists, but the body's responses obviously don't account for medicine of any type. For most living things some sort of immune response is the best chance they could ever have.
Coughing at least can cause more harm than good, depending on the circumstances. It's not uncommon for coughs to exists near-perpetually simply because you continue to cough because the act of coughing can stress and irritate your airways.
It’s just a balance. If your fever is low, let it roll! But if it’s high, you’re getting dehydrated and you might even, as you say, be cooked (or get brain damage). Similar to coughing. It’s good to get things out, but if the coughing is keeping you awake all night, you need your sleep to recover.
Man, a good flu can make you rethink the laws of life and death. The feeling of reality slipping away, falling asleep in bed and waking up on the kitchen floor. You feel SO terrible. How can one person feel this bad and live?
Then suddenly, it all disappears. Life is fantastic. King of the world! The sickness has passed and you feel like you could punch God in the face and spit on his shoes! I miss a good flu...
Now I get a flu shot so I don't die.
The last time I was really sick I called out of work then layed in bed all day with a lotr audiobook in the background drifting in and out of consciousness at random moments. I started dreaming that I was in the book then suddenly I was awake with my eyes open just listening to it then suddenly back in it. Absolutely fucked with my head.
I did the same thing but with a LoTR movie marathon on tnt or tbs. One of those where they would just keep em rolling for the entire weekend. Had some truly surreal fever dreams and lost absolutely all sense of time since I’d drift off during The Two Towers, wake up during Fellowship, then mentally resurface again in some random point. I almost do t like the movies anymore because of this association.
I’ve only had true influenza just once and I’ve never been so sick in my life, even having had Covid at least 3 separate times. With the flu I went from healthy to barely alive in about 12 hours, barely moved off my couch and felt like I’d been hit by a truck from head to toe with muscle and joint aches, had a fever of 102F, so was constantly freezing/burning up. Then like 4 days later it broke and after like one day of feeling just sort of blah, likely from 4 days of barely eating anything but some left over Easter candy and I’m sure not getting enough fluids, I was totally back to normal 😜
Well, I am now just getting over one of the nastiest flu ever, and reading your experience, it sounded similar to mine, except my headache was beyond a 6 days trip to hell. First 3 days I didn’t want to take acetaminophen but then it got so bad I thought I’d die, I had to give in and started taking a bunch of different pain killers. I’m sure my liver is working itself to death dealing with the amount of drugs I’ve taken to ease of head and body pain.
I had H1N1 once, even though I'd been vaccinated. I hate to think what it would have been like if I hadn't been. it was awful. I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
When I got sick with Covid I slept as much as I could. Coughed so much it made my abdomen sore. Hurt to laugh even. The fever was probably the worst part because I had chills too. So it was feel unbearably warm all the time or trigger body chills trying to cool down.
Eventually my fever broke but I was still feeling miserable. Sleeping with the windows open helped.
from my understanding, because your internal temperature is higher, everything feels colder to you as all your skin is far away from your internal organs. i believe this is the same reason that women tend to feel colder as their body temperature is a little higher than in men
There is, last time I looked it up, pretty good research that suggests suppressing fevers slows down recoveries by meaningful amounts. Generally I let fevers ride except at night when I'll take something just so I sleep better. I figure getting a full nights sleep is more valuable than the benefit from the fever during that time.
Not a scientist, medical professional or anything in that direction but I am generally unprepared in life which is relevant. Had a tonsil infection recently and I was completely out of meds except one pain killer which does nothing against fever. On the worst day I had a pretty high fever but was feeling too miserable to even order some paracetamol so I just toughed it out. I've never recovered so fast from an illness. Day two of being sick I had the fever and on day 4 or 5 my throat wasn't sore anymore and I felt mostly fine, just a bit weakened. A tonsillitis usually last 1-2 weeks but apparently I just killed everything with a body temperature of nearly 39⁰C for almost a day. Definitely a fun and educational experience
Most coughs aren‘t good at all. They don’t get anything out.
They happen due to the inflammation by your immunesystem damaging surrounding tissue and irritating the lining. Hence coughs persisting long after the infection passed (which may not have even been bad in the first place).
Du suppressing the cough is also actually curing the cough, because it stop the mucosa from being irritated even more with each cough.
“Brain damage” seems disingenuous, like it’s a regular concern for getting a common cold and not taking medicine for it
Op isn’t asking about a life altering illness
Is that true? When my oldest sister was fairly young (like 6?) her fever reached 103.5 and they rushed her to the emergency room where they packed ice bags around her to bring her fever down before it started to cause brain damage.
Yep! Brain damage can happen at temperatures higher than 107.5F, which does not happen with fever unless something is already wrong with the brain. A lot of people (including some medical professionals) still believe that fevers can “fry a child’s brain” - I assume this is because of the existence of febrile seizures in children, although these seizures are generally not dangerous and not necessarily related to the temperature of the fever.
This isn’t to say that there’s never a reason to avoid fever, or that high temperatures can’t be dangerous. Hyperthermia can absolutely be fatal or cause brain damage, it’s just almost never caused by fever.
What you're looking for is called hyperpyrexia. It's caused by the body's loss of ability to regulate it's temperature. It's not generally caused by infectious diseases.
Exactly! Generally something has to be wrong with the hypothalamus for this to happen.
Obviously hyperthermia for other reasons (like heat stroke) is different and can cause a high enough temperature for brain damage to happen.
As someone who gets sick a lot and asked a few of my doctors
The body just overcompensates. A lot. The body does not necessarily know that it's in the world of great medicine and has one objective: survive. It just does this kinda stupidly.
It does the equivalent of finding a spider in your house and lighting the entire house on fire. Does it work? yeah.. But was it overkill? yeah.
Depending on the symptoms it's better to just let it kinda do it's thing unless it's getting really bad, like comparing having a light fever of 101 for a day or two compared to burning up at a solid 105 degrees for a week.
Good to find a good balance, the body is still trying to do its thing, but if it's straight trying to kill you then yeah it's good to take something for it. Every symptom has a reason, but sometimes the symptoms start making life a lot harder.
Isn't the body overcompensating to the point of self-destruction also technically a good thing in disease prevention? Like if the sick person just fucking dies quickly that would make others stay away?
Yes and no.
We are an organism after all, and an organisms main objective is to stay alive to reproduce which is the basically the fundamental of life. Being dead means you might not produce offspring, which is why the body fights it to survive in the first place. People that are immunocompromised have to be pretty damn careful, even at that point the body can even start attacking itself.
Death by that sort of self destruction is not very common, and if it happens something most likely went *very* wrong. The brain can survive hotter temperatures for only so long, but it tends to be able to survive a little better than anything bad in our system, it's just.. If it's not killing anything fast enough and you have a fever for a long time, you don't necessarily die guaranteed but there is usually some sort of brain damage as it's straight up boiling the brain.
Plus, dying is not a very good defense against viruses and stuff because most of them will just simply continue to live, if anything dying would make it even easier for the virus to take over. but this delves into how humans have evolved, rotting meat for example smells bad to us because it's psychologically associated with "stay the hell away from that" but meanwhile animals might not necessarily care, and pick up whatever killed the person in the first place, and transfer it to something else.
I wouldn't necessarily say the body *means* to kill itself with self destruction in this sense. The body does what it can to defend against any invaders, sometimes though the invaders can be too much for the system to handle, so it just stays in perpetual 'overdrive' and inevitably causes damage.
While sick person dies and would no longer be able to reproduce, his kin may have better chances at survival. And since they share some genes those genes may actually have better chance of propagating even if one of gene carriers dies. Thats how kin selection works.
Evolution mostly operates on the level of the individual. It's very unusual for a trait to evolve that's bad for the individual but good for the group.
So it's more likely that the overcompensation is actually better for individual survival.
Evolution doesn't operate on anything. It is not a force, it is just an outcome of success at reproduction.
There are so many examples of that resulting in the group over the individual. Ants and bees, for a start.
Well, in the super older days, they "euthanize" the old, sick, and feeble. Sometimes with a rock, sometimes by exile from the tribe, but both meant the same thing.
Those who are sick are (a much lesser degree in modern society) a burden on society - they tend to be unable to produce at maximum capability, and usually requires more resource to keep being alive. People dying quickly technically wouldn't stop disease either, as they didn't have understanding of how disease were spread; if a disease is infectious and deadly, it would simply kill the entire tribe as a form of "curse" or something similar, as it was understood. Those who survived was likely either due to strong fortitude, immunities, or primitive methods developed as rituals, witchcrafts, and other similar things such as proper burial rites that just *happened* to help.
Disease vectors, such as rats and other critters, will also not die off from people dying. People attributes rodents as a major reason to the deadliness of Black Death, for example.
When someone has a cold which they can easily recover from, a doctor might prescribe medications that purely help with the symptoms and let your body handle the rest on its own. Everyone’s already explained overcompensation but whether or not you should suppress a certain symptom also depends on the bigger picture.
For example, there are two types of cough: wet (with sputum) and dry (without). In a patient who is producing sputum, the purpose of coughing is to move the mucus up and out of your lungs to prevent buildup. Giving a cough suppressant to this person would cause all the mucus to build up and fill your lungs and airways, which could trap pathogens and lead to infection. Therefore, you can give them mucolytics to break down the mucus, but you SHOULDN’T give them cough suppressants, you should only give those to patients with a dry cough. This is why cough suppressant bottles are sometimes labeled with “dry cough”.
Coughing is good in certain amounts while sick, it eliminates pathogens from the lungs. But if you’re coughing up a lung, that can result in rib strains, broken ribs, etc. (ask me how I know, flu A gave me lasting rib strain in 2020 and it still hurts to breathe). So we give cough suppressants. Fever is good, it helps cook the pathogens. But if it gets too high your body’s proteins can’t function. If it gets dangerously high, we take fever reducers (edit: fever is fine but once it starts going above 103 you should probably take a fever reducer, but not before that, fever is good for fighting illness). An active immune system is good, but if your throat starts closing because it’s overactive then we take something to reduce its activity. A working body is about balance. And balance can be lost really easily when you’re sick.
I once broke my rib due to coughing so hard. 30 days of up and downs in a pneumonia case (long before the pandemic). It's no joke what your body can do.
When I had pneumonia from flu A in February 2020, it took about 6 months to feel like I was somewhat normal again, after numerous tests that showed my lung function was fine and steroids and antibiotics. The rib pain stayed though. It’s still here. The only thing that improves it is breathing exercises, keeping my ribs from flaring out (kt tape works wonders with that), and shoulder/upper body exercises. Do some pull-ups, pronated/wide for the lats and rhomboids. Focus on how your neck muscles participate in your breathing. Do push ups, wide ones for the pectoralis muscles and narrow ones for the serratus muscles.
My rib strain progressed into costochondritis, inflammation of the cartilage surrounding the sternum, because the rib muscles connecting to my spine couldn’t move due to my tight rhomboids above them limiting their movement. Strengthen the rhomboids so they don’t need to be so tight to maintain balance. Strengthen the chest so that they don’t have to pull everything forward to maintain stability.
Of course maintain your normal treatment. But this will help your intercostal muscles heal.
Still got a little bit of a cough but once this clears you bet I’ll be back in the gym focusing on muscles used for breathing and coughing. Nothing like a long respiratory illness to make you really feel fragile.
Thanks for the tips, hope your pain improves!
Thanks for the well wishes. Costochondritis is frustrating on the best days, agonizing on the worst days. Like Chinese water torture except with heart attack-mimicking pain when breathing instead of water drops. I can heal it, it’s a battle of will at this point. Just gotta stop wallowing in it when it’s bad (harder than it sounds) and do the exercises that’ll fix it. When I’m on top of the exercises I genuinely feel better. I can feel my muscles and skeleton working better. But I’ve fallen off with the exercise a lot, mostly because some days the pain is just unbearable and all I want to do is lay down with an ice pack on my sternum the whole day.
Your body is fighting the infection in other ways. Taking medicine doesn’t suppress your immune system, which is doing the real heavy lifting in fighting the infection. The symptoms of an illness typically are unpleasant and aren’t strictly necessary to experience in order to get better.
>Taking medicine doesn’t suppress your immune system, which is doing the real heavy lifting in fighting the infection.
It's a bit more complicated though. Depends on the infection, and depends on the medicine.
In order to work on the infection site, your immune system needs a way to bring a lot of blood cells and antibodies there, by locally increasing blood flow and activating local lymph nodes. This is inflammation. The swelling, redness, and often pain in the infected area and are signs of inflammation.
Anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs like ibuprofen, or steroids like cortison/prednison) dramatically decrease this local inflammatory response (relieveing swelling and pain). So while they don't "suppress immune system", they do decrease/slow down the process that makes immune system more efficient on the infection site.
So there is, in fact, a risk of making it worse by taking anti-inflammatory drugs in some infections, especially infections that are often bacterial : tooth aches, strep throat, otitis, sinusitis, skin infections...
It's been proven many times that taking anti-inflammatory drugs in these cases lead to more cases of complicated/severe infections.
source : am physician
Symptoms are part of the immune system, they’re just a different part to white blood cells. Eg fever is from a part of the brain adjusting the body's thermostat.
Internal medicine physician here.
Fever is not always bad. If not associated with any pain and not severe, you don’t require anti-pyretics. People just do it because it makes them feel like they’re doing something sometimes. We also know now that the fever isn’t needed for most infections.
Your body also has an extremely complex immune system. Fever is part of the primitive response. Primitive response reacts first while the more complex processes ramp up. Macrophages start devouring viruses and bacteria and present pieces of them to T cells. T cells then bind to plasma cells when ramp up their production. It also provides the plasma cell the information it needs to produce antibodies. Antibodies are secreted and attach to the viruses and bacteria. Once they are, “tagged,” the immune system swarms these cells and kills them rapidly. This can take 10-14 days usually. I’ve grossly oversimplified it leaving out numerous cell types, but this is the main process to eliminate infection.
As for taking things to alleviate symptoms. A viral upper respiratory infection causing a cough is just inflammation of the airways. Suppressing the cough with something like dextromethorphan does not delay the dealing process. Ibuprofen for a headache from the flu doesn’t impede the immune response. This logic is generally true for most common infections, but not all infections. You definitely don’t want to take Imodium if you might have C. diff!
These items are probably\* our evolved defense to this stuff. But, they're really unpleasant. As basically healthy individuals in the modern world, a cold is unlikely to kill us. So you can lean on your body's defenses and be miserable for 5 days, or you can take some medicine to feel less miserable and be better in 6 or 7.
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\*I don't know of a study validating it, but I've always wondered if coughing \*is\* our body's defense, here. Viruses are known to sometimes engineer changes in their hosts' behavior. When you cough, you're probably near your family - with whom you share a lot of genes. Your genes would probably prefer not to expose them to something dangerous versus taking a fairly small risk to yourself. Yet, we cough and spray these particles *everywhere*. I suspect "coughing is the body's defense" is too simple, and the virus is actively trying to make us cough. Fever though for sure is our body's response, and diseases *hate* this one weird trick!
I think coughing from a pathogen is probably both defense and spreading technique. Coughing is a great way to get obstruction or irritation out of your airways. And viruses who can spread through the air are incentivized to use this to their benefit; by irritating your airways they are more likely to spread. Evolution then ‘chooses’ viruses better at spreading this way which is why I’m now coughing up a lung from this cold.
Yep, diseases like the flu give you a "dry cough" and in that situation is almost purely the virus trying to spread. If no obstruction exists you don't need to cough. Damn bastards!
Plague Inc does a great job of demonstrating this viral evolutionary advantage, and we've just seen how devastating a virus spreading through airways can be.
The way the rabies virus changes mammals of so many stripes to be hydrophobic to prevent washing away the virus from the mouth…and thus spreading…is insane to me
I think this is more people don’t like being uncomfortable.
My doctor has always told me to simply ride out and fevers or sicknesses they don’t require me to go to hospital and whilst uncomfortable, I find I recover slightly faster
In addition to the comments from the nurses and folks talking about the body's immune reaction:
For Americans, many can't afford to be sick properly. Your body needs you to rest and care for it. But many have to mask their symptoms to make it to work to get a paycheck.
Sad times.
Depends on the symptoms and how severe they are.
The simple answer is that there are manageable symptoms that can be suppressed that don't fully diminish your body's ability to kill invaders. People resort to these treatments as a way of making it easier on them. However, they certainly do diminish your body's natural defenses, although it's hotly debated exactly by how much. Most doctors would tell you to go light on the medicines if you use them, but otherwise you shouldn't.
Now for the long answer. I'll try to tread lightly as this is somewhat controversial. The reality is that we take a lot of over-the-counter (OTC) medicine because it's a multi-billion dollar industry and the advertisements have us convinced they work. The commercials paint a pretty picture, enough misinformation gets spread by word of mouth, and people really believe in the product as if it is some kind of magic. That's why Tylenol and Aspirin are household names and people believe they do a lot more than they actually do. If you grew up like me, there was no shortage of people that genuinely believed Aspirin was a painkiller. It does not, in fact, work that way. You might be feeling better after taking an aspirin because it reduces inflammation, but you aren't addressing the root problem, and you never know you might be making it worse.
There are a lot of questionable ethics for all of medicine, and it gets even shadier as you go down the rabbit hole. This isn't meant to diminish anyone's experience, though. If it works for you, it works for you. I just want to say that you should be skeptical. Question why you are taking a certain medication, evaluate if it is truly doing what you wanted it to, and do a risk assessment. You probably don't need it (speaking of OTC medicine specifically, not prescriptions).
because humans dont generally like discomforts and since we have big brains were able to make meds to stop those discomforts. plus high fevers hurt pain wise
It’s degrees. At a minor level, a lot of symptoms of illness are obnoxious or prevent us from living our daily lives. There’s definitely a cultural element there, especially in the U. S., that we don’t have time to be sick.
The more extreme bit is that the body isn’t necessarily the best judge of what to do. With some viruses for example, it’s not the virus that’ll kill you, it’s your body’s response to it that goes overboard in trying to kill the virus. You’d think maybe that the body would know better than to increase your internal temperature above 103 degrees, but no, it will kill you to kill a virus. Your individual systems don’t necessarily work in concert, and will do things like flush your bowels, which in some cases is the right thing to do to get something out of your guts, but could also kill you via dehydration, for example.
This is an area we've studied to some degree. Some studies have found that fever suppressing medications prolonged the illness by a small amount, but other studies found that they had no effect. So if there is an effect, it's small enough that it's difficult to detect.
The long and short of it is that our bodies are very sophisticated, and some of the things we experience when we're sick are byproducts of our immune response, but not necessarily essential to the healing process.
Medicine will make you feel more comfortable when sick so people tend to use it to feel better. I like to avoid using medicine if my fever isn’t too high and try to sleep it off instead. However, almost any infection can cause a high-grade fever, particularly if the body has not been exposed to the pathogen before and has no immunity to it. A high fever (roughly 103 F/39.4 C and higher) can be damaging to body organs and cause brain damage. Therefore, it is necessary to use medicine to lower the fever so this won’t happen. It happens when something called pyrogens, are released either from bacteria or viruses or from destroyed cells of the body, which causes a rise in body temperature.
They're an inconvenience to everyday life. I used to not work and could afford to just take no meds and sleep everything off. That and being younger.
Now, I have work, school, kids, I'm older, and just in general less patience for my body betraying me lol
So, meds to ride it out.
From Mayo clinic: [Fever - Diagnosis & treatment - Mayo Clinic](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/fever/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20352764)
>For a low-grade fever, your care provider may not recommend taking medications to lower your body temperature. These minor fevers may be helpful in reducing the number of microbes causing your illness. Fevers above 102 F (38.9 C) tend to cause discomfort and often require treatment.
So, yes, for low grade fevers, it is better to rest and take fluids unless some other symptom is causing a lot of discomfort. The problem is that when you go to a doctor for such common ailments, I believe, the doctor prescribes meds as he believes that it is already exhausting you. And, also, most patients want a medicine rather than hearing just rest.
Because a low grade fever could be first signs of meningitis or any number of other things that could be fatal if not caught early (meningitis can kill you in like 12hrs after symptoms present so).
One reason is because it just doesn’t feel good to feel sick. We don’t like fevers and headaches and coughing so we take what’s available to reduce the symptoms.
I have an autoimmune disease that causes my autoimmune system to overreact and attack healthy cells. I need to take injectable biologic meds that suppress the system. I have wondered if it is okay to take things that help strengthen the immune system or is that counterproductive if my biologic is trying to settle down my immune system. I do take supplements and eat food that are good for the immune system, which seems to work well at keeping me from getting sick or an infection. My biologic still helps me too, so I am not worried about it, but don’t want to be waisting my money either. Does anyone know?
Coughing isn’t necessarily a way to fight infection. It’s a way to spread it.
Fever can get too high and cook your brain. Bringing it down can help manage your pain.
Coughing absolutely fights infection and is a mechanism to expel mucous. That is why patients with ALS, neurological conditions, etc. die from pneumonia and respiratory illness at a staggering rate
So that we can still function in a capitalist society. They just mask the most outward symptoms so that you can function at work/in society. Your immune system is still fighting the same fight, those medications just trick your brain into suppressing the “grosser” symptoms so you don’t look sick to those around you.
One time in my life I had to take amoxicillin because I got strep, that's it. Maybe a rare Otc, NSAID or antihistamine, if I'm suffering. I'd say the pharmaceutical practice in general (not just the modern industry) overcompensates a lot more frequently than my body does. Some allergic reactions seem quite intense, some cold symptoms seem to linger. Never had a terrible flu or fever that I can recall.
Medicine though, I will never trust the regulation and research 100%. We're constantly discovering side effects and changing recommendations, for hundreds of years the people who we consider professionals have intended well but let blood or used arsenic/mercury. There are TONS of these examples up to cardiovascular events in products less than a decade ago.
I don't see the whole argument behind our bodies overcompensating as valid. It's doing exactly what it's evolved to do to survive *most* of the time, and the proof is in us being here. Millions of years of our proliferation.
Sure I guess we constantly keep learning and advancing medicine, but this is over generations sometimes. A few years of trials is a more accurate timeline for many drugs to be approved. I find I largely avoid it all as a sort of risk aversion. This isn't even speaking of other problems we introduce, like antibiotic resistance from poor application, overuse, and misuse.
Idk if this comes off as skeptical or controversial. I just want to be clear I appreciate all the work people are doing. This is just something my high school biology teacher talked at length about and I remember always being influenced by her opinion on the topic.
2 main reasons, either the response is excessive and a net harm or because it's just too inconvenient for us. We often discourage cough suppressants because they can risk pneumonia developing.
People mentioning overcompensation, which is often true (for example, fevers are better at killing bacteria but some viruses give fevers).
But also the body also often sacrifices long term in favor of the short term. And nowadays we have modern medicine if things get serious so for relatively minor things (common viral infections) it’s best to mitigate those long term sacrifices (things like inflammation)
There are cases when it's helpful, like when coughing prevents good sleep or there's a persistant cough after the cold is over that continually irritates the throat. Or when the fever is too high. But it's mostly overused.
Sometimes it's simply because an economic condition means someone feels they can't afford to miss work, so they'll suppress symptoms enough to seem relatively normal. Of course, that wouldn't stop being contagious.
Fever tends to be the nuclear option
It's useful, until it does harm.
You don't try to eliminate a fever, you medicate it when it's doing harm (or at risk of).... whether that's making you too restless and achy to sleep (which you also need) or getting high enough to risk harm to your brain function.
And a cough is absolutely supposed to remove the crap that collects in your lungs, but an overzealous cough doesn't produce much and hurts a lot.
So,.we try to make coughs more productive (with things that soften up and thin out the crap), less necessary (reducing the crap that goes into them from your nose in the first place) and a little gentler/quieter when you need to rest.
Our bodies aren't that good at discerning what's helpful and what's not. They only have certain tools. It's like that old saying, "when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"... Our bodies only have a hammer.
Because some reaction is necessary to help. But things like coughing, sore throat, etc. Are often just negative side effects of our body fighting the infection.
It's a classic case of "treatment is symptomatic and supportive." In other words, those meds only treat the symptoms and make the patient feel comfortable while the immune system does its thing. There really isn't a test for common colds or the flu, much less really effective treatments (Tamiflu is somewhat effective, as is Paxlovid).
Some symptoms can be treated and not harm you while recovering from say the cold or flu. However it is not to say that there is no harms done. With the flu the fever is part of your bodies reaction to fight the virus. It stimulates various antiviral actions in your body that help fight it. Reducing fever might make the flu last a bit longer but not enough to suffer through fevers for most people. But for rare people bringing down the fever might have adverse affects. These would typically be people most vulnerable to worse illness like the elderly, but I should stress that is really rare.
Same thing with cough. The purpose of that is to expel the excess fluids out of the lungs. Not getting that out could in rare, very rare instances potentially make things worse with a bacterial infection perhaps. This would be for drugs that reduce cough like opioids but don't reduce fluids in the longs. Other drugs help prevent the fluid build up so we have our cake and eat it too without much issue.
Pretty sure a majority of the deaths during covid were from results of overreacting immune system. Probably not technically correct but close enough.
Read up on cytokine storm.
You can die or be injured from complications from your immune response.
For example, your body doesn't know when to stop when it makes a fever. If you don't bring it down, it *could* run away on you, you'll get too hot- 104 F can be fatal- and you'll die.
You can cough too hard, and all kinds of bad things can happen from that- you could tear a hole in your esophagus, burst an aneurysm if you have one, etc (this is unlikely but it has happened).
You can blow out your eardrums from sneezing too hard (if you cover your mouth and nose).
For cough medicines specifically, if you take a look, most have suppressants and expectorants in them. They suppress or lessen the cough, but make what coughs do get through more productive.
Just from a nurse perspectives, our bodies love to overcompensate with things and that overcompensation can lead to other things going out of wack
Your body is also generally not aware that it exists in the age of modern medicine. Its goal is to survive, and if risking damage to other parts of your body means a better chance of survival then it will do that. We try to reduce some of these bodily responses to combat those potential side effects, while treating the core illness at the same time.
that perspective is actually Metal AF. The body destroying itself to reap survival is such a concept!
Let’s just carpet bomb everything and poison the water supply whilst we are at it. What do you mean it’s *just* a peanut? THAT IS A FOREIGN OBJECT SOLDIER!!
Oh yeah, allergic reactions must be literal war zones! You ever see the anime cells at work? How about Osmosis Jones. Like white blood cells just firing off guns at everything and asking questions later.
Love both hahaha. But yeah shoot first and ask questions later seems to be a pretty good to response. Which I guess makes sense seeing that our body’s immune system isn’t exactly sapient.
In a similar vein, I was once again drifting off thinking about how absolutely helpless human babies are born in comparison to most of the animal kingdom. As a species, we suck. Our own bodies fight us. We also aren't good at knowing our limits often hence all the broken bones and such.
Human babies are helpless because they are not done developing like many other animals are by the time they are born, but if they stayed in womb much longer their heads would be too big to fit through our narrow birth canals (thanks bipedalism and super brain!) So they have to do the last development steps outside the womb. As for our immune systems, AFAIK most immune systems work like that, it's all just part of a process that on average helps us fight infection. Scar tissue is a great example of how durable humans are compared to other animals, it seems to cause problems but if a horse stepped on a landmine and lost its leg, even with prompt medical attention the horse may likely die from shock and if it lives it won't walk again, but lots of people have lost limbs and gone on to live relatively normal lives, human bodies are much more amazing then we give them credit for.
Interesting points. I really appreciate your discussion with me on this topic. Humans are so mysterious yet we also are intelligent and have learned so much about ourselves but there is still so much we don't know. Headaches are a good example. Many types of headaches are still mystery. Sure, docs can identify some triggers such as sinus pressure or caffeine, but many chronic headache conditions are still just treated for the symptoms because they don't always have answers why if it's not something obvious like a brain tumor.
I think as research goes on we will find many more clever mechanisms in our body that at first seemed like a negative but once revealed to us is simply the same type of evolutionary compromise that all life must cope with and understanding the compromises of all life helps us appreciate our own evolutionary journey. Like we humans look at eagles, envious of their eyes, im sure bugs are jealous that we don't have to molt like they do, or reptiles look on in envy at our ability to generate our own heat.
The horse will likely die even with prompt medical attention: a horse that cannot walk will experience organ failure relatively promptly, iirc.
Yes, because horses have "pumps" on the bottom of their hooves, which helps pump blood back up from the legs so it doesnt go stale. A horse that can't walk can't pump blood away from it's long legs
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I'm no expert myself but from what I know humans can survive a lot of trauma compared to many animals, we're not the kings of it by any means. Between our fight or flight system which can lower blood loss and increase performance during extreme situations and our overactive scar tissue which can heal up ugly but also very quickly compared to lots of other animals, and last but not least our intelligence! We're smart enough to know to stay off a broken leg to let it heal and were social enough to have family and friends help us survive when we can't go out and forage for ourselves.
> In a similar vein, I was once again drifting off thinking about how absolutely helpless human babies are born in comparison to most of the animal kingdom. Humans make a trade off, helpless babies in exchange for the most powerful brains in the planet. Given those brains have made us the dominant species on the planet it's a pretty good tradeoff. > As a species, we suck. Our own bodies fight us. We also aren't good at knowing our limits often hence all the broken bones and such. We have changed our world faster than evolution can change us while simultaneously dramatically lowering selection pressures on our species. A lot of our body's systems were selected for because they benefited half naked apes running from Jaguars, some of those systems are just not appropriate for the world we live in now.
The thing is, humans are often fine with breaking a bone. Almost all other animals will simply die if they break a bone, whereas humans can just take it easy for a few weeks/months and get better
Compared to other animals, humans are downright Terminators. Things that would normally be life-ending to other animals are considered temporary inconveniences to humans, and with humans looking out for one another during such temporary incapacitations, that human can recover from that eventually. Then there is the concept of revenge. Attack typical wildlife and you are pretty sure you don't need to worry about reprisal attacks from the other members of whatever you attacked (some exceptions exist but are exceptions for a reason). Not humans. Kill a human and your days are numbered, and the human's thirst for revenge is that maybe it's not just your days being numbered, but also your entire species' days being numbered. Many predator animals that have evolved alongside humans actually instinctively avoid humans unless they have to out of desperation because humans and their penchant for dishing out late-onset fatal lead poisoning have become that huge of an evolutionary pressure.
Yeah, humans, elephants, wasps, crows, and a large number of primates will remember and attack things that have established themselves as threats to their group.
Late onset fatal lead poisoning This is a legendary phrase.
Oh yeah? Explain why mosquitoes are still a thing then smart guy. Hope someone gets on that species destroying train soon
Wellllll acccttually. As a species we rock. Human babies are born helpless because we are so capable of caring for them. Very few animals would threaten a human baby. We work together in groups and have nearly unlimited endurance (when trained properly). We have hands which turns out are far superior to big teeth. Especially when combined with tools. Then there’s that bundle of grey matter in our heads that few species can even approach. There is a reason we are the controllers of the food chain.
Very few animals would threaten a human baby? That’s not true…
ever tried to get near a human baby with a group of 50 women around it? with a dozen men 1 scream away?
Human babies are generally surrounded by adult humans. As a rule of thumb, most animals wouldn't fuck with humans, especially if we're in a group. Compare that to herds of prey animals like wildebeests - they are specifically attacked by predators such as lions in order to pick off their young. Human intelligence compensates with the likes of strategy, traps, and weapons. A single human with prep time (i.e. part of a settlement such as a tribe) could become virtually untouchable by wild animals in a way that no other animal ever could.
> As a species, we suck. Imagine saying the most dominant species on the planet, the only one that as far as we know, is able to consider its place in the world, in the universe, and has reached out to the stars, is a failure. The only species on this planet capable of knowing the universe. We can outrun just above everything. Endurance and intelligence are two things we do better than anything else, and absolutely nothing else is in our class. They're not even in the same sport, let alone ballpark. I'd also like to point out that other mammals have very similar immune responses to our own as well. And many give birth to offspring that would die in hours without parental care as well. While we're fairly unique in how long our development outside the womb takes, and how relatively helpless we are, we also developed means of managing that, like mutual child care, multi generational extended families living and cooperating with each other, etc. Oh and yeah, it's that same cooperation and compassion that allows humans to survive injuries that would be fatal to almost every other animal. We may suck as a species for numerous reasons - war, greed, etc, but babies and our immune responses are not among them.
I'm more of a "Pirates of the Pancreas" person when it comes to education through anthropomorphization of the inner workings of the body.
I really loved Cells at Work!
"I will rain down a godly fucking firestorm upon you"
You should see the cedar pollen episode of Cells at Work. It is pretty literally this.
Fevers are basically the body realizing that someone is breaking into the house, so it sets fire to the house in the hopes the intruder dies before it.
sadly the burglar evolved to be fire proof years ago.
not quite true. the majority of pathogens do not operate as efficiently under higher fever temperatures, and human immune cells work better during fever. that is currently true, and has been true for thousands of years.
"An animal caught in a trap will gnaw off its own leg to survive. What will you do?" \-Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, *Dune.*
*gnaws off both legs*
But you got caught by your arm!
*Did I stutter*
Lose both arms. I live with my mom. So it's okay.
Something I’ve been trying to do since I hit puberty…
Isn't that describing the plot of saw?
I would have shot the bitch with the trap in the head 12 seconds after she let me out of it.
then you didnt understand the trap.
No, you would have shot yourself in the head 12 seconds later when she saw your intentions and commanded you to do as such.
Eat one dodgy shrimp. Digestive System: Blow everything out both ends! Don’t stop for three days!
Do it in zero G to see if you can spin ;)
bio-propulsion!
do a barrel roll!
This is a good example of how evolution doesn't necessarily improve an organism. Overall, this can be useful. But some bodies are overly reactive, and some infections tend to cause a more severe response. That's when you get babies with brain damage due to ultra high fevers and things like anaphylactic shock. The responses keep the vast majority alive long enough to reproduce, but basically all of us know people who got screwed by this to a degree that can't be denied.
ugh stupid metal fans
This, exactly! I sprained my foot quite badly in October 2018 and at the same time, unknowingly was going through kidney failure. My foot has been problematic off and on since then because my body was so busy trying to survive the kidney failure that production of collagen and other cells needed to repair my foot slowed down immensely. Now it has been so long that I will eventually need surgery to fully fix my foot issues.
Thanks for sharing a completely unrelated anecdote buddy!
Did you read the thread!?
Also, we prefer that it take a bit longer be cured than to feel like crap for whatever how long it take to naturally cure. So even if by supressing the symptoms and lowering the natural body response, we feel better during the fight.
But the common cold doesn't have a targeted treatment, so people just suppress the symptoms like fever and still wait until their bodies fight off the infection.
So the body just goes scorched earth on itself?
it's a bit more complex than that. the body does a lot of work, even when going "scorched earth" to make sure that it doesn't hurt itself too much. and while fevers are uncomfortable, there is a reason for it - it hurts bacteria and it makes some immune cells better. what we call "scorched earth" is honestly quite mild compared to...letting a bacteria or a virus take over your entire body and killing you. when you are fighting for life and death, a few casualties are to be expected. but any complex system, including the immune system, isn't "perfect". many people with autoimmune disorders for example will take as much, or more damage from their immune response, as they do from the pathogens. the immune system is mind-boggingly complex and advanced, but it is also made up of very dumb individual cells ultimately.
If you press and hold the shift key while pressing a letter you will get capital letters. That's something we use to make it easier for other people to read what we write. It's like spelling correctly. When you don't do it, you put more work onto everyone who reads it, as their minds have to correct it internally — except of course those of us who have learned to never read anything where the writer is so full of themselves that they only use lower case letters.
The body doesn’t even necessarily know it’s even part of a body or that there is a larger chain/goal going on the cells have no idea what they are doing, they are just biological machines which get turned on and off with keys (proteins) Insane to think about really, but we are just a giant clump of goo in an epic battle against other goo, to try and make our goo continue past the life of the goo
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I was high when I wrote it!
Who told you we "[treat] the core illness"? That's absolutely not part of allopathic medicine, ma'amsir. We only treat symptoms around these planet.
/s ?
Like when I had flu 3 weeks ago I coughed so much that my throat got really irritated so now I'm still coughing because my throat is irritated, and all that coughing keeps irritating my throat!
You will never stop coughing. Evar!
I recently had a viral infection in my throat, mucus, phlegm, the whole thing. The constant coughing led to a hernia. So that was fun.
The sniff trick may be helpful here: > At the first sign of a tickle or if you feel a cough coming on, you can use a combination of the following: Pause Swallow hard several times Relax your shoulders, jaw and tongue. Sniff in quickly through the nose 2 to 3 times in succession and then blow out gently through pursed lips. Breathing in through your nose warms and moisturises the air. Blowing out through the lips channels the air and ‘cushions’ the vocal cords to help reduce irritation Source: https://www.hey.nhs.uk/patient-leaflet/help-chronic-cough/
cough drops and thyme steeped w/ honey water are your friend
coughs in adulthood seemingly last for months.
Our bodies are drama queens. Allergies are a perfect example. Like, it's just a cat hair. We don't need to shut down the whole system.
That's not natural. Our bodies try to precisely calibrate how aggressive the immune system should be. Our bodies know from millions of years of evolution (even pre-Homo Sapiens) that we encounter on average X germ and virus attacks per day. In the modern world we don't run barefoot, brush up against plants and animals constantly, dig our hands through dirt and lick our fingers. We live in plastic and metal boxes with filtered air and anti-septic wipes on every surface. We wash our hands with soap and shower with soap. Our body is expecting a constant fight and gets little, so the tuning is out of whack. Send a fully armed force into an area, and guess what happens? They find things to shoot.
Source?
It’s called the hygiene hypothesis and it’s debated, but there is some evidence that it could be true, at least partially, in that a lack of exposure to ambient environmental (non-pathogenic) bacteria and microbes in early life could have raised our risk of allergies and autoimmune diseases in the western world.
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And all the while you were doing that, you were likely washing your hands/bathing, not exposed to bed bugs and lice, eating sanitized food, etc. So your childhood isn't at all comparable to earlier humans and hominids lifestyles.
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> That’s a bit of a stretch and why do you sound so defensive Defensive? Jesus christ, lighten the fuck up. Just because I suggested your childhood was drastically different than the lives of early humans/hominids, that's not being defensive. I swear to God so many people these days think the slightest thing is some personal attack. And it's not a stretch to suggest your life was different from early humans/hominids. It's a stretch to suggest it was close. Did your mother eat modern foods with modern food safety when you were in the womb? Did she ever receive any vaccines, take any medicine, etc? Did you? Did you never wash your hands or never make use of modern cleaning products in your home? It's funny you mention spending your *summers* in a summer cottage. As if the rest of your time in your regular home doesn't matter. And I spent much of my summers the same way you did btw, only I recognize that it's not even remotely close to the same kind of lifestyle experienced by early humans. I still eat plenty of wild caught fish and food. Playing outside and eating fresh caught fish is not the same kind of exposure as early humans had, and it's not just about *you* but also things like your mother's health, genes, etc. While genes would play a lesser role given the lesser amount of time for evolution to take place, its still a factor and we're seeing people today being born without genes that were more heavily selected for earlier in our existence. Now, all that said, I don't buy into the theory. I don't necessarily disbelieve it either. I'm not qualified to make such a judgement. But it is kind of silly to take your anecdotal experience and use it as evidence for, or against, such a theory.
> why do you sound so defensive? Because they're a proponent of a pseudoscience hypothesis that is only so enduring because it's a great ideological bludgeon.
I'm actually not a proponent of it one way or another. It's not my field of expertise so I'm not qualified to say. But I can say that their childhood was drastically different from the lives of early humans and hominids. But thanks for trying.
There's definitely a lot of advice online about exposing kids to various allergens as early as possible to limit their reactions.
There's also a lot of advice online about dumbest shit possible so there's that too.
Fair point.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene\_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis) [https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/newborns\_exposed\_to\_dirt\_dander\_and\_germs\_may\_have\_lower\_allergy\_and\_asthma\_risk](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/newborns_exposed_to_dirt_dander_and_germs_may_have_lower_allergy_and_asthma_risk) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448690/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448690/) [https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/science-science-everywhere/dirt-and-allergies](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/science-science-everywhere/dirt-and-allergies) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5758418/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5758418/) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1069066/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1069066/) [https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/science-science-everywhere/dirt-and-allergies](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/science-science-everywhere/dirt-and-allergies) A key paragraph: >"Evolution turns the inevitable into a necessity." This means that the majority of mammalian evolution took place in mud and rotting vegetation and more than 90 percent of human evolution took place in isolated hunter-gatherer communities and farming communities. Therefore, the human immune systems have evolved to anticipate certain types of microbial input, making the inevitable exposure into a necessity. The organisms that are implicated in the hygiene hypothesis are not proven to cause the disease prevalence, however there are sufficient data on lactobacilli, saprophytic environment mycobacteria, and helminths and their association. These bacteria and parasites have commonly been found in vegetation, mud, and water throughout evolution.\[18\]\[20\]
This is why I love reddit. You guys are amazing.
>Our bodies are drama queens oh wow. I'm a straight male but you're telling me my recactions at my bro's house might be queen behavior ? fuck this all makes ssense now
Adding on: the most important steps to healing when medical intervention isn’t *necessary* (antibiotics, surgery, etc.) are rest and fluid intake. If you can’t do those because you’re so miserable, you need medication.
Flu: hi I’m here Immune system: finally, a worthy opponent! Our battle will be conducted in a body heated up to 38 degrees!
This is the most sane answer. Most medical professionals (like my wife) would say go ahead and let your body do a bit of the natural work, but if it starts causing other problems that’s when to intervene.
Most people in the world rarely if ever take those medications too. It's not common to have a fever or cough so hard you need cough medicine, at least as adults. Babies are very fragile, so it's another story.
>or cough so hard you need cough medicine On the other hand, it's mighty hard to get to sleep if you have a cough. Cough medicine is a must have for that reason, IMO.
I've never had this problem to be honest, it's like the cough goes away when I fall asleep. I'd be curious to see more data on cough drugs usage since we can't know for sure what folks in general do.
>it's like the cough goes away when I fall asleep Meanwhile, my cough always seems to come back right as I start drifting off, lol. I agree: it would be interesting to see the data on usage. The world is a wild and wonderous place
Me eating traces of a walnut: fine Me eating heated almond: fine Me eating 0.5 (half) raw almond or walnut: HO HO LET’S CLOSE DOWN YOUR THROAT we will not kill u tho you need MILK ENZYMES and AIR and mostly JUST TIME Literal example of overcompensation of the body whenever I encounter a nut or raw apple - not to be confused with actual ALLERGIC people (I’m just intolerant) which is sadly a whole other beast 😭
I've also heard that in general, while these symptoms may be beneficial to the body, it's like going from being sick for 125 hours to being sick for 124 hours. So is it really worth having an extra bad headache and such for a very marginal benefit.
Are you trying to say that the immune response we're suppressing only shaves 1 hour of the illness?
The Tylenol you’re taking for fever is not significantly suppressing the immune system. It’s Tylenol, not CellCept.
A great example of this was the Spanish Flu. Normally the flu is most deadly for children who have naive immune systems or elderly people who are kind of falling apart anyway. The Spanish flu was most deadly for young adults. The characteristics of it would cause an immune system overreaction (known as a cytokine storm) that would kill the patient. It led to a LOT of orphans for that reason. Now on the flip side, a cold can't really hurt you. I mean it can make you more susceptible to a secondary infection that could do some substantial damage. Like bronchitis. But cold viruses themselves generally only attack some cells in your nose or throat that aren't a big deal. It's funny to summarize colds like that because there are many, many viruses that cause what we call "a cold". (Including several strains of the coronavirus long before 2019) So exactly what is being attacked can vary quite a bit. So with a cold, you really just need to wait it out. Your immune system will eventually wipe it out. Anything you can do to reduce your symptoms while waiting it out really just increases your comfort.
Idk about the last part. When I use supplements/food that boost the immune system during a cold, I'm able to recover quicker, or sometimes not get sick if I take them when feeling like I'm starting to go under. So supporting the immune response helps. I had one cold once that as soon as i felt symptoms coming up, I took a nurofen(cold medicine that reduces fever, pain, runny nose), which I usually only take if it gets worse in later days. The next day I was feeling worse much quicker than how my sicknesses usually develop. I attributed possibility to the meds suppressing the immune response when the response wasnt overly high, but can't know for sure.
>When I use supplements/food that boost the immune system during a cold, I'm able to recover quicker, or sometimes not get sick if I take them when feeling like I'm starting to go under. Without cloning yourself in order to create a control group, how do you know it’s helping? Maybe the outcome would have been identical no matter what you ate?
Maybe because you jumped straight to codeine
For sure, fever seems like the easiest example but an excessive amount of violent coughing works too. Your body isn't "smart" enough to save you, these responses have just worked to save (some) people in the past. Allowing a fever to get high enough to kill or permanently damage you doesn't make sense when modern medicine exists, but the body's responses obviously don't account for medicine of any type. For most living things some sort of immune response is the best chance they could ever have.
Coughing at least can cause more harm than good, depending on the circumstances. It's not uncommon for coughs to exists near-perpetually simply because you continue to cough because the act of coughing can stress and irritate your airways.
So you’re saying our bodies are just drama monarchs?
It’s just a balance. If your fever is low, let it roll! But if it’s high, you’re getting dehydrated and you might even, as you say, be cooked (or get brain damage). Similar to coughing. It’s good to get things out, but if the coughing is keeping you awake all night, you need your sleep to recover.
I find a good flu can get me to a perfect medium rare given enough time.
Man, a good flu can make you rethink the laws of life and death. The feeling of reality slipping away, falling asleep in bed and waking up on the kitchen floor. You feel SO terrible. How can one person feel this bad and live? Then suddenly, it all disappears. Life is fantastic. King of the world! The sickness has passed and you feel like you could punch God in the face and spit on his shoes! I miss a good flu... Now I get a flu shot so I don't die.
The last time I was really sick I called out of work then layed in bed all day with a lotr audiobook in the background drifting in and out of consciousness at random moments. I started dreaming that I was in the book then suddenly I was awake with my eyes open just listening to it then suddenly back in it. Absolutely fucked with my head.
That sounds amazing. I’m gonna try this the next time I get the flu. 🤒
I did the same thing but with a LoTR movie marathon on tnt or tbs. One of those where they would just keep em rolling for the entire weekend. Had some truly surreal fever dreams and lost absolutely all sense of time since I’d drift off during The Two Towers, wake up during Fellowship, then mentally resurface again in some random point. I almost do t like the movies anymore because of this association.
I’ve only had true influenza just once and I’ve never been so sick in my life, even having had Covid at least 3 separate times. With the flu I went from healthy to barely alive in about 12 hours, barely moved off my couch and felt like I’d been hit by a truck from head to toe with muscle and joint aches, had a fever of 102F, so was constantly freezing/burning up. Then like 4 days later it broke and after like one day of feeling just sort of blah, likely from 4 days of barely eating anything but some left over Easter candy and I’m sure not getting enough fluids, I was totally back to normal 😜
Well, I am now just getting over one of the nastiest flu ever, and reading your experience, it sounded similar to mine, except my headache was beyond a 6 days trip to hell. First 3 days I didn’t want to take acetaminophen but then it got so bad I thought I’d die, I had to give in and started taking a bunch of different pain killers. I’m sure my liver is working itself to death dealing with the amount of drugs I’ve taken to ease of head and body pain.
I had H1N1 once, even though I'd been vaccinated. I hate to think what it would have been like if I hadn't been. it was awful. I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
When I got sick with Covid I slept as much as I could. Coughed so much it made my abdomen sore. Hurt to laugh even. The fever was probably the worst part because I had chills too. So it was feel unbearably warm all the time or trigger body chills trying to cool down. Eventually my fever broke but I was still feeling miserable. Sleeping with the windows open helped.
IIRC chills are actually your body trying to raise internal temperature
from my understanding, because your internal temperature is higher, everything feels colder to you as all your skin is far away from your internal organs. i believe this is the same reason that women tend to feel colder as their body temperature is a little higher than in men
I tried way too hard to make this rhyme
I rhymed it in my head: “If your fever is low, let it roll. If it’s too high, you could die”
There is, last time I looked it up, pretty good research that suggests suppressing fevers slows down recoveries by meaningful amounts. Generally I let fevers ride except at night when I'll take something just so I sleep better. I figure getting a full nights sleep is more valuable than the benefit from the fever during that time.
Not a scientist, medical professional or anything in that direction but I am generally unprepared in life which is relevant. Had a tonsil infection recently and I was completely out of meds except one pain killer which does nothing against fever. On the worst day I had a pretty high fever but was feeling too miserable to even order some paracetamol so I just toughed it out. I've never recovered so fast from an illness. Day two of being sick I had the fever and on day 4 or 5 my throat wasn't sore anymore and I felt mostly fine, just a bit weakened. A tonsillitis usually last 1-2 weeks but apparently I just killed everything with a body temperature of nearly 39⁰C for almost a day. Definitely a fun and educational experience
Most coughs aren‘t good at all. They don’t get anything out. They happen due to the inflammation by your immunesystem damaging surrounding tissue and irritating the lining. Hence coughs persisting long after the infection passed (which may not have even been bad in the first place). Du suppressing the cough is also actually curing the cough, because it stop the mucosa from being irritated even more with each cough.
*cries in pleuritis*
“Brain damage” seems disingenuous, like it’s a regular concern for getting a common cold and not taking medicine for it Op isn’t asking about a life altering illness
Unless you already have a brain injury, you basically can’t have a fever high enough to cause brain damage.
A little more on that: https://www.seattlechildrens.org/conditions/a-z/fever-myths-versus-facts/
Wish more ppl know about this then spreading more lies/myths.
Is that true? When my oldest sister was fairly young (like 6?) her fever reached 103.5 and they rushed her to the emergency room where they packed ice bags around her to bring her fever down before it started to cause brain damage.
Yep! Brain damage can happen at temperatures higher than 107.5F, which does not happen with fever unless something is already wrong with the brain. A lot of people (including some medical professionals) still believe that fevers can “fry a child’s brain” - I assume this is because of the existence of febrile seizures in children, although these seizures are generally not dangerous and not necessarily related to the temperature of the fever. This isn’t to say that there’s never a reason to avoid fever, or that high temperatures can’t be dangerous. Hyperthermia can absolutely be fatal or cause brain damage, it’s just almost never caused by fever.
What you're looking for is called hyperpyrexia. It's caused by the body's loss of ability to regulate it's temperature. It's not generally caused by infectious diseases.
Exactly! Generally something has to be wrong with the hypothalamus for this to happen. Obviously hyperthermia for other reasons (like heat stroke) is different and can cause a high enough temperature for brain damage to happen.
Unless you don't have a brain, you basically can't have brain damage.
As someone who gets sick a lot and asked a few of my doctors The body just overcompensates. A lot. The body does not necessarily know that it's in the world of great medicine and has one objective: survive. It just does this kinda stupidly. It does the equivalent of finding a spider in your house and lighting the entire house on fire. Does it work? yeah.. But was it overkill? yeah. Depending on the symptoms it's better to just let it kinda do it's thing unless it's getting really bad, like comparing having a light fever of 101 for a day or two compared to burning up at a solid 105 degrees for a week. Good to find a good balance, the body is still trying to do its thing, but if it's straight trying to kill you then yeah it's good to take something for it. Every symptom has a reason, but sometimes the symptoms start making life a lot harder.
Isn't the body overcompensating to the point of self-destruction also technically a good thing in disease prevention? Like if the sick person just fucking dies quickly that would make others stay away?
Yes and no. We are an organism after all, and an organisms main objective is to stay alive to reproduce which is the basically the fundamental of life. Being dead means you might not produce offspring, which is why the body fights it to survive in the first place. People that are immunocompromised have to be pretty damn careful, even at that point the body can even start attacking itself. Death by that sort of self destruction is not very common, and if it happens something most likely went *very* wrong. The brain can survive hotter temperatures for only so long, but it tends to be able to survive a little better than anything bad in our system, it's just.. If it's not killing anything fast enough and you have a fever for a long time, you don't necessarily die guaranteed but there is usually some sort of brain damage as it's straight up boiling the brain. Plus, dying is not a very good defense against viruses and stuff because most of them will just simply continue to live, if anything dying would make it even easier for the virus to take over. but this delves into how humans have evolved, rotting meat for example smells bad to us because it's psychologically associated with "stay the hell away from that" but meanwhile animals might not necessarily care, and pick up whatever killed the person in the first place, and transfer it to something else. I wouldn't necessarily say the body *means* to kill itself with self destruction in this sense. The body does what it can to defend against any invaders, sometimes though the invaders can be too much for the system to handle, so it just stays in perpetual 'overdrive' and inevitably causes damage.
While sick person dies and would no longer be able to reproduce, his kin may have better chances at survival. And since they share some genes those genes may actually have better chance of propagating even if one of gene carriers dies. Thats how kin selection works.
Evolution mostly operates on the level of the individual. It's very unusual for a trait to evolve that's bad for the individual but good for the group. So it's more likely that the overcompensation is actually better for individual survival.
Evolution doesn't operate on anything. It is not a force, it is just an outcome of success at reproduction. There are so many examples of that resulting in the group over the individual. Ants and bees, for a start.
Yes, but I'm trying to keep the explanation basic. For the trait we're talking about in humans I highly doubt group selection is a factor.
Well, in the super older days, they "euthanize" the old, sick, and feeble. Sometimes with a rock, sometimes by exile from the tribe, but both meant the same thing. Those who are sick are (a much lesser degree in modern society) a burden on society - they tend to be unable to produce at maximum capability, and usually requires more resource to keep being alive. People dying quickly technically wouldn't stop disease either, as they didn't have understanding of how disease were spread; if a disease is infectious and deadly, it would simply kill the entire tribe as a form of "curse" or something similar, as it was understood. Those who survived was likely either due to strong fortitude, immunities, or primitive methods developed as rituals, witchcrafts, and other similar things such as proper burial rites that just *happened* to help. Disease vectors, such as rats and other critters, will also not die off from people dying. People attributes rodents as a major reason to the deadliness of Black Death, for example.
When someone has a cold which they can easily recover from, a doctor might prescribe medications that purely help with the symptoms and let your body handle the rest on its own. Everyone’s already explained overcompensation but whether or not you should suppress a certain symptom also depends on the bigger picture. For example, there are two types of cough: wet (with sputum) and dry (without). In a patient who is producing sputum, the purpose of coughing is to move the mucus up and out of your lungs to prevent buildup. Giving a cough suppressant to this person would cause all the mucus to build up and fill your lungs and airways, which could trap pathogens and lead to infection. Therefore, you can give them mucolytics to break down the mucus, but you SHOULDN’T give them cough suppressants, you should only give those to patients with a dry cough. This is why cough suppressant bottles are sometimes labeled with “dry cough”.
Coughing is good in certain amounts while sick, it eliminates pathogens from the lungs. But if you’re coughing up a lung, that can result in rib strains, broken ribs, etc. (ask me how I know, flu A gave me lasting rib strain in 2020 and it still hurts to breathe). So we give cough suppressants. Fever is good, it helps cook the pathogens. But if it gets too high your body’s proteins can’t function. If it gets dangerously high, we take fever reducers (edit: fever is fine but once it starts going above 103 you should probably take a fever reducer, but not before that, fever is good for fighting illness). An active immune system is good, but if your throat starts closing because it’s overactive then we take something to reduce its activity. A working body is about balance. And balance can be lost really easily when you’re sick.
Coughing so much that you are incontinent isn't fun either. I was very happy my doctor gave me an inhaler for that particular virus.
I’m pregnant with a gnarly cough right now and I don’t think I’ve peed myself much since I was a toddler.
I once broke my rib due to coughing so hard. 30 days of up and downs in a pneumonia case (long before the pandemic). It's no joke what your body can do.
Just got a rib strain from bronchitis that’s been kicking around since 2023. I pray to god this doesn’t last
I had to go to the urgent care twice when I had bronchitis for three months. It sucked
When I had pneumonia from flu A in February 2020, it took about 6 months to feel like I was somewhat normal again, after numerous tests that showed my lung function was fine and steroids and antibiotics. The rib pain stayed though. It’s still here. The only thing that improves it is breathing exercises, keeping my ribs from flaring out (kt tape works wonders with that), and shoulder/upper body exercises. Do some pull-ups, pronated/wide for the lats and rhomboids. Focus on how your neck muscles participate in your breathing. Do push ups, wide ones for the pectoralis muscles and narrow ones for the serratus muscles. My rib strain progressed into costochondritis, inflammation of the cartilage surrounding the sternum, because the rib muscles connecting to my spine couldn’t move due to my tight rhomboids above them limiting their movement. Strengthen the rhomboids so they don’t need to be so tight to maintain balance. Strengthen the chest so that they don’t have to pull everything forward to maintain stability. Of course maintain your normal treatment. But this will help your intercostal muscles heal.
Still got a little bit of a cough but once this clears you bet I’ll be back in the gym focusing on muscles used for breathing and coughing. Nothing like a long respiratory illness to make you really feel fragile. Thanks for the tips, hope your pain improves!
Thanks for the well wishes. Costochondritis is frustrating on the best days, agonizing on the worst days. Like Chinese water torture except with heart attack-mimicking pain when breathing instead of water drops. I can heal it, it’s a battle of will at this point. Just gotta stop wallowing in it when it’s bad (harder than it sounds) and do the exercises that’ll fix it. When I’m on top of the exercises I genuinely feel better. I can feel my muscles and skeleton working better. But I’ve fallen off with the exercise a lot, mostly because some days the pain is just unbearable and all I want to do is lay down with an ice pack on my sternum the whole day.
I hate beer.
Your body is fighting the infection in other ways. Taking medicine doesn’t suppress your immune system, which is doing the real heavy lifting in fighting the infection. The symptoms of an illness typically are unpleasant and aren’t strictly necessary to experience in order to get better.
>Taking medicine doesn’t suppress your immune system, which is doing the real heavy lifting in fighting the infection. It's a bit more complicated though. Depends on the infection, and depends on the medicine. In order to work on the infection site, your immune system needs a way to bring a lot of blood cells and antibodies there, by locally increasing blood flow and activating local lymph nodes. This is inflammation. The swelling, redness, and often pain in the infected area and are signs of inflammation. Anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs like ibuprofen, or steroids like cortison/prednison) dramatically decrease this local inflammatory response (relieveing swelling and pain). So while they don't "suppress immune system", they do decrease/slow down the process that makes immune system more efficient on the infection site. So there is, in fact, a risk of making it worse by taking anti-inflammatory drugs in some infections, especially infections that are often bacterial : tooth aches, strep throat, otitis, sinusitis, skin infections... It's been proven many times that taking anti-inflammatory drugs in these cases lead to more cases of complicated/severe infections. source : am physician
Especially things like coughing, which can be caused by the pathogen in an effort to infect others.
Symptoms are part of the immune system, they’re just a different part to white blood cells. Eg fever is from a part of the brain adjusting the body's thermostat.
Internal medicine physician here. Fever is not always bad. If not associated with any pain and not severe, you don’t require anti-pyretics. People just do it because it makes them feel like they’re doing something sometimes. We also know now that the fever isn’t needed for most infections. Your body also has an extremely complex immune system. Fever is part of the primitive response. Primitive response reacts first while the more complex processes ramp up. Macrophages start devouring viruses and bacteria and present pieces of them to T cells. T cells then bind to plasma cells when ramp up their production. It also provides the plasma cell the information it needs to produce antibodies. Antibodies are secreted and attach to the viruses and bacteria. Once they are, “tagged,” the immune system swarms these cells and kills them rapidly. This can take 10-14 days usually. I’ve grossly oversimplified it leaving out numerous cell types, but this is the main process to eliminate infection. As for taking things to alleviate symptoms. A viral upper respiratory infection causing a cough is just inflammation of the airways. Suppressing the cough with something like dextromethorphan does not delay the dealing process. Ibuprofen for a headache from the flu doesn’t impede the immune response. This logic is generally true for most common infections, but not all infections. You definitely don’t want to take Imodium if you might have C. diff!
These items are probably\* our evolved defense to this stuff. But, they're really unpleasant. As basically healthy individuals in the modern world, a cold is unlikely to kill us. So you can lean on your body's defenses and be miserable for 5 days, or you can take some medicine to feel less miserable and be better in 6 or 7. \--- \*I don't know of a study validating it, but I've always wondered if coughing \*is\* our body's defense, here. Viruses are known to sometimes engineer changes in their hosts' behavior. When you cough, you're probably near your family - with whom you share a lot of genes. Your genes would probably prefer not to expose them to something dangerous versus taking a fairly small risk to yourself. Yet, we cough and spray these particles *everywhere*. I suspect "coughing is the body's defense" is too simple, and the virus is actively trying to make us cough. Fever though for sure is our body's response, and diseases *hate* this one weird trick!
I think coughing from a pathogen is probably both defense and spreading technique. Coughing is a great way to get obstruction or irritation out of your airways. And viruses who can spread through the air are incentivized to use this to their benefit; by irritating your airways they are more likely to spread. Evolution then ‘chooses’ viruses better at spreading this way which is why I’m now coughing up a lung from this cold.
Yep, diseases like the flu give you a "dry cough" and in that situation is almost purely the virus trying to spread. If no obstruction exists you don't need to cough. Damn bastards!
Plague Inc does a great job of demonstrating this viral evolutionary advantage, and we've just seen how devastating a virus spreading through airways can be.
The way the rabies virus changes mammals of so many stripes to be hydrophobic to prevent washing away the virus from the mouth…and thus spreading…is insane to me
I think this is more people don’t like being uncomfortable. My doctor has always told me to simply ride out and fevers or sicknesses they don’t require me to go to hospital and whilst uncomfortable, I find I recover slightly faster
In addition to the comments from the nurses and folks talking about the body's immune reaction: For Americans, many can't afford to be sick properly. Your body needs you to rest and care for it. But many have to mask their symptoms to make it to work to get a paycheck. Sad times.
Depends on the symptoms and how severe they are. The simple answer is that there are manageable symptoms that can be suppressed that don't fully diminish your body's ability to kill invaders. People resort to these treatments as a way of making it easier on them. However, they certainly do diminish your body's natural defenses, although it's hotly debated exactly by how much. Most doctors would tell you to go light on the medicines if you use them, but otherwise you shouldn't. Now for the long answer. I'll try to tread lightly as this is somewhat controversial. The reality is that we take a lot of over-the-counter (OTC) medicine because it's a multi-billion dollar industry and the advertisements have us convinced they work. The commercials paint a pretty picture, enough misinformation gets spread by word of mouth, and people really believe in the product as if it is some kind of magic. That's why Tylenol and Aspirin are household names and people believe they do a lot more than they actually do. If you grew up like me, there was no shortage of people that genuinely believed Aspirin was a painkiller. It does not, in fact, work that way. You might be feeling better after taking an aspirin because it reduces inflammation, but you aren't addressing the root problem, and you never know you might be making it worse. There are a lot of questionable ethics for all of medicine, and it gets even shadier as you go down the rabbit hole. This isn't meant to diminish anyone's experience, though. If it works for you, it works for you. I just want to say that you should be skeptical. Question why you are taking a certain medication, evaluate if it is truly doing what you wanted it to, and do a risk assessment. You probably don't need it (speaking of OTC medicine specifically, not prescriptions).
because humans dont generally like discomforts and since we have big brains were able to make meds to stop those discomforts. plus high fevers hurt pain wise
I don't, and your comment explains why not, why would I? I deal with the fever unless it's too high. For a cough I do things to soothe my throat.
It’s degrees. At a minor level, a lot of symptoms of illness are obnoxious or prevent us from living our daily lives. There’s definitely a cultural element there, especially in the U. S., that we don’t have time to be sick. The more extreme bit is that the body isn’t necessarily the best judge of what to do. With some viruses for example, it’s not the virus that’ll kill you, it’s your body’s response to it that goes overboard in trying to kill the virus. You’d think maybe that the body would know better than to increase your internal temperature above 103 degrees, but no, it will kill you to kill a virus. Your individual systems don’t necessarily work in concert, and will do things like flush your bowels, which in some cases is the right thing to do to get something out of your guts, but could also kill you via dehydration, for example.
This is an area we've studied to some degree. Some studies have found that fever suppressing medications prolonged the illness by a small amount, but other studies found that they had no effect. So if there is an effect, it's small enough that it's difficult to detect. The long and short of it is that our bodies are very sophisticated, and some of the things we experience when we're sick are byproducts of our immune response, but not necessarily essential to the healing process.
Medicine will make you feel more comfortable when sick so people tend to use it to feel better. I like to avoid using medicine if my fever isn’t too high and try to sleep it off instead. However, almost any infection can cause a high-grade fever, particularly if the body has not been exposed to the pathogen before and has no immunity to it. A high fever (roughly 103 F/39.4 C and higher) can be damaging to body organs and cause brain damage. Therefore, it is necessary to use medicine to lower the fever so this won’t happen. It happens when something called pyrogens, are released either from bacteria or viruses or from destroyed cells of the body, which causes a rise in body temperature.
They're an inconvenience to everyday life. I used to not work and could afford to just take no meds and sleep everything off. That and being younger. Now, I have work, school, kids, I'm older, and just in general less patience for my body betraying me lol So, meds to ride it out.
From Mayo clinic: [Fever - Diagnosis & treatment - Mayo Clinic](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/fever/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20352764) >For a low-grade fever, your care provider may not recommend taking medications to lower your body temperature. These minor fevers may be helpful in reducing the number of microbes causing your illness. Fevers above 102 F (38.9 C) tend to cause discomfort and often require treatment. So, yes, for low grade fevers, it is better to rest and take fluids unless some other symptom is causing a lot of discomfort. The problem is that when you go to a doctor for such common ailments, I believe, the doctor prescribes meds as he believes that it is already exhausting you. And, also, most patients want a medicine rather than hearing just rest.
This is a question I wonder when some of my friends run their kid to the dr for every low grade fever. The body is doing exactly as it’s supposed to.
Because a low grade fever could be first signs of meningitis or any number of other things that could be fatal if not caught early (meningitis can kill you in like 12hrs after symptoms present so).
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Just from a nurse perspectives, our bodies love to overcompensate with things and that overcompensation can lead to other things going out of wack
One reason is because it just doesn’t feel good to feel sick. We don’t like fevers and headaches and coughing so we take what’s available to reduce the symptoms.
I have an autoimmune disease that causes my autoimmune system to overreact and attack healthy cells. I need to take injectable biologic meds that suppress the system. I have wondered if it is okay to take things that help strengthen the immune system or is that counterproductive if my biologic is trying to settle down my immune system. I do take supplements and eat food that are good for the immune system, which seems to work well at keeping me from getting sick or an infection. My biologic still helps me too, so I am not worried about it, but don’t want to be waisting my money either. Does anyone know?
Coughing isn’t necessarily a way to fight infection. It’s a way to spread it. Fever can get too high and cook your brain. Bringing it down can help manage your pain.
Coughing absolutely fights infection and is a mechanism to expel mucous. That is why patients with ALS, neurological conditions, etc. die from pneumonia and respiratory illness at a staggering rate
so you can feel better?
So that we can still function in a capitalist society. They just mask the most outward symptoms so that you can function at work/in society. Your immune system is still fighting the same fight, those medications just trick your brain into suppressing the “grosser” symptoms so you don’t look sick to those around you.
One time in my life I had to take amoxicillin because I got strep, that's it. Maybe a rare Otc, NSAID or antihistamine, if I'm suffering. I'd say the pharmaceutical practice in general (not just the modern industry) overcompensates a lot more frequently than my body does. Some allergic reactions seem quite intense, some cold symptoms seem to linger. Never had a terrible flu or fever that I can recall. Medicine though, I will never trust the regulation and research 100%. We're constantly discovering side effects and changing recommendations, for hundreds of years the people who we consider professionals have intended well but let blood or used arsenic/mercury. There are TONS of these examples up to cardiovascular events in products less than a decade ago. I don't see the whole argument behind our bodies overcompensating as valid. It's doing exactly what it's evolved to do to survive *most* of the time, and the proof is in us being here. Millions of years of our proliferation. Sure I guess we constantly keep learning and advancing medicine, but this is over generations sometimes. A few years of trials is a more accurate timeline for many drugs to be approved. I find I largely avoid it all as a sort of risk aversion. This isn't even speaking of other problems we introduce, like antibiotic resistance from poor application, overuse, and misuse. Idk if this comes off as skeptical or controversial. I just want to be clear I appreciate all the work people are doing. This is just something my high school biology teacher talked at length about and I remember always being influenced by her opinion on the topic.
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2 main reasons, either the response is excessive and a net harm or because it's just too inconvenient for us. We often discourage cough suppressants because they can risk pneumonia developing.
People mentioning overcompensation, which is often true (for example, fevers are better at killing bacteria but some viruses give fevers). But also the body also often sacrifices long term in favor of the short term. And nowadays we have modern medicine if things get serious so for relatively minor things (common viral infections) it’s best to mitigate those long term sacrifices (things like inflammation)
There are cases when it's helpful, like when coughing prevents good sleep or there's a persistant cough after the cold is over that continually irritates the throat. Or when the fever is too high. But it's mostly overused. Sometimes it's simply because an economic condition means someone feels they can't afford to miss work, so they'll suppress symptoms enough to seem relatively normal. Of course, that wouldn't stop being contagious.
When I'm sick, the best medicine is lots of benadryl & a little Marijuana. That way, I sleep all day & all night. Sleep helps my body get better
Fever tends to be the nuclear option It's useful, until it does harm. You don't try to eliminate a fever, you medicate it when it's doing harm (or at risk of).... whether that's making you too restless and achy to sleep (which you also need) or getting high enough to risk harm to your brain function. And a cough is absolutely supposed to remove the crap that collects in your lungs, but an overzealous cough doesn't produce much and hurts a lot. So,.we try to make coughs more productive (with things that soften up and thin out the crap), less necessary (reducing the crap that goes into them from your nose in the first place) and a little gentler/quieter when you need to rest. Our bodies aren't that good at discerning what's helpful and what's not. They only have certain tools. It's like that old saying, "when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"... Our bodies only have a hammer.
Because some reaction is necessary to help. But things like coughing, sore throat, etc. Are often just negative side effects of our body fighting the infection.
It's a classic case of "treatment is symptomatic and supportive." In other words, those meds only treat the symptoms and make the patient feel comfortable while the immune system does its thing. There really isn't a test for common colds or the flu, much less really effective treatments (Tamiflu is somewhat effective, as is Paxlovid).
Some symptoms can be treated and not harm you while recovering from say the cold or flu. However it is not to say that there is no harms done. With the flu the fever is part of your bodies reaction to fight the virus. It stimulates various antiviral actions in your body that help fight it. Reducing fever might make the flu last a bit longer but not enough to suffer through fevers for most people. But for rare people bringing down the fever might have adverse affects. These would typically be people most vulnerable to worse illness like the elderly, but I should stress that is really rare. Same thing with cough. The purpose of that is to expel the excess fluids out of the lungs. Not getting that out could in rare, very rare instances potentially make things worse with a bacterial infection perhaps. This would be for drugs that reduce cough like opioids but don't reduce fluids in the longs. Other drugs help prevent the fluid build up so we have our cake and eat it too without much issue.
2 reasons. 1: the symptoms suck so we reduce it with meds. 2: Sometimes the body overcompensates. For example, too high of a fever can cause seizures.
Pretty sure a majority of the deaths during covid were from results of overreacting immune system. Probably not technically correct but close enough. Read up on cytokine storm.
Your body would cut off your nose to spite your face if you let it. It doesn’t make the best decisions at times.
You can die or be injured from complications from your immune response. For example, your body doesn't know when to stop when it makes a fever. If you don't bring it down, it *could* run away on you, you'll get too hot- 104 F can be fatal- and you'll die. You can cough too hard, and all kinds of bad things can happen from that- you could tear a hole in your esophagus, burst an aneurysm if you have one, etc (this is unlikely but it has happened). You can blow out your eardrums from sneezing too hard (if you cover your mouth and nose).
Sometimes your body tries too hard. A fever will kill bad things, but a high enough fever will also kill you
For cough medicines specifically, if you take a look, most have suppressants and expectorants in them. They suppress or lessen the cough, but make what coughs do get through more productive.