Kids and Fever

I see kids in the ER with fevers virtually every shift. Often, parents have done nothing to try to improve the fever. They seem to have a fear that somehow the fever will kill their child. They don’t understand that the fever is helping fight the infection.

Additionally, something that is not intuitive is that the body would not try to harm itself. So, most fevers will cap out < 105°F. That’s about the max temperature that the body will push for to try to fight the infection because temperatures higher than that can cause tissue damage, specifically denaturing of proteins. But somehow, with all the internet searching that’s done, it does not seem like parents find that information.