apparently, while sick at my aunts house, i managed to vex her so much that she called my mother for reinforcement.

"she refuses to sleep under the covers!" i could hear the edge of frustration, born out of a deep concern in her voice drift up the stairs from the phone. "i have to sneak into her room in the middle of the night to make sure that she's covered up. and," she added as if this just topped it all off, "i caught her doing exercises this morning."

she must have realized that calling my mom would be futile. my sister later confirmed what i suspected my mom's diplomatic response was:

"oh well, i'm sure she knows what's best for her."

mom had long since since fought and lost the battle of wills. i think that no one in my family can be as stubborn or as headstrong as i can.

the trouble, i reflected as i rolled over, content in my unchallenged state, stemmed from an irreconcilable difference in the philosophy of fevers. fevers, more than any other aspect of an illness, have the ability to generate the most myths and the most treatment advice. almost everyone i know has a a slightly different philosophy about fevers, why they happen, and what one should do about them. i am sure you have heard at least one of the following:

you should sweat a fever

you should chill a fever

sustained high fevers are bad for you

a fever, sore throat, and headache means you have strep

fevers are good for you

you should let a fever run its course

if you don't treat a fever it will never go away

my aunt's particular strain of belief went something like this. in order to get over a fever, you need to continue making yourself warm until you start sweating. once a healthy sweat has been achieved, your fever will break, and you will be on the road to recovery.

i suffered for the first few days at the mercy of my aunt's theory. she would pile the blankets on, cool my head off with towels and ice packs, and then take my temperature every hour.

unfortunately for her, i absolutely abhor getting hot. when i get overheated, i get grumpy at best, and a migraine at worst. i tossed and turned in discomfort, yet continued, at this point, to believe that my aunt knew best. but as i lay there, i began to give her philosophy more thought. first of all, it didn’t make sense to pile on the blankets and then expect the fever to go down. every time she took my temperature, i became more and more exasperated. how can your body lose the excess heat if you deliberately insulate it? furthermore, i began to increasingly believe that our bodies were not meant to sustain a temperature of 104 for a long period of time. my mind was haunted by images of delicate proteins denaturing, or at very least beginning to lose their efficacy (in the lab, it only takes a few degrees for this to happen). that’s when i decided i’d had enough, and launched my own treatment program.

this is my philosophy: in general, during sickness i try to listen to my body the most, and to what instinct tells me. usually when i have a fever, i feel hot to the touch, but feel cold, and therefore pile on the blankets. so far, two different philosophies have yielded the same treatment.

however, listening to one’s instincts has it’s associated problems, and i never really know when to stop listening to my instincts, and when i should listen to logic and hard science. consider this. our instincts have evolved over thousands of years to react to illnesses in a way that you would assume to maximize our chances of survival. this is a happy theory indeed, and if completely true, then we can happily listen to our instincts without worry. hwoever, this would only be true if the illness acted as a natural selective factor. the question is, how often do people die of the flu? or they don’t have to die of the flu, necessarily, but the flu must make them unfit enough that having the flu means that their chances for fitness and reproductive heath are significantly decreased. can that be said of the flu? i don’t think so. therefore, it becomes immediately suspect to unreservedly trust one’s instincts. do you see how tricky this becomes? now, if we say that we cannot trust our instincts, then what does it mean to feel a certain way? why are we cold, why do we shiver? these sorts of feelings ellicit an active response; how and why did we develop this response? well, it might be that fevers simply are a by product of the virus metabolizing.

at any rate, that’s when i started kicking off the blankets, refusing to sleep with anything but a light covering.

this went on for about a day, but i still wasn’t getting better, my fever was still going strong, and on top of it, i felt really cold, and couldn’t stop shivering. so back on with the covers. at that point, i decided that i hadn’t really given my aunt’s theory a valid test. the part that i really wasn’t sure about was whether she was confusing the symptom or the cause. when your fever breaks, you sweat. but to deliberately make yourself sweat, does that mean that your fever will break? nothing to do now but to try, so i bravely layered on the blankets, and placed ice packs on my head. my aunt, happy now that i was seeing things her way, religiously changed these ice packs every thirty minutes. a kinder or more attentive nurse i could not ask for.

and finally, finally, after nearly a day of this horrid inferno, i began to sweat. and wouldn’t you know it? my fever did go down a couple degrees. sadly, by nightfall, it started to go back up again.

the other thing about me and sickness is that the only drug i take is aspirin. i asked for aspirin, i got any number of strange brews and powders, from herbal medicine to something akin to tylenol cold and flu. finally, my mom, who came over on the fouth day of my illness, brought blessed aspirin (none of these drug cocktails for me), which i promptly took, broke into a drenching sweat, and lost the fever.

the other odd myth of my aunt’s is that taking a bath or shower would make me sicker. as such, she would not allow me to take a bath, at all, until my fever stayed low for at least a day. now this, i think, is ridiculous, and it exasperated me to no end. finally, on the fifth day, i was allowed to take a shower. little did they know that while my aunt and uncle had left the house the day before, i had taken a surreptitions shower.

but if there is a lesson to be learned, i would have to say that my aunt was right. which reinforces my belief in traditional medical wisdom. but again, this has many caveats; consider the practice of leeching. the main issue i have is how all these traditions have been discredited and completely discounted largely because of political influences and without any regard to their efficacy or validity, when the ama tried to remove power from non mds, establishing themselves as the only authorized dealers in health and health information. as a result, we have come not to trust ourselves, forcing us to go to the doctor for something as petty as a cold, or to panic when we have the flu. we have lost the centuries of wisdom that might give us healing and comfort. it is empowering, then, to regain some of that.