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While the question stated is factual, this is still basically medical advice and is better suited to IMHO. The factual question involved may still be discussed there (along with other advice and opinion).
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
(and I hope you feel better soon)
I’ve asked a doctor about this before. It doesn’t really matter. With a sinus infection, though, irritating the throat can cause it become inflamed and infected.
He didn’t actually mention this part, so this is my own personal opinion. But a fever is a defense mechanism. It’s beneficial to to have a slight fever for fighting off the infection. That’s what I was taught in high school biology anyway. Obviously an out of control fever is means something has gone quite wrong. If you’ve got crazy vitals than you should definitely go to a doctor and have them sort you out. I had meningitis and my blood pressure and temperature were not in very sane ranges. That’s a sign there’s something different going on. Tylenol broke the 104+ fever pretty quickly though.
While that’s an interesting (and possibly even true) hypothesis, it’s not been proven. And even if true, reducing pain and fever may well have immune system benefits greater than those gained by the fever.
Sure, but does it build character? 
Like I said, my doctor didn’t say that, but my high school biology teacher did. Take it as you may. My doctor said it doesn’t really matter and that’s the main point I was going with. So even if a fever does do something, it doesn’t do enough that it’s widely obvious that we know that you shouldn’t reduce a fever except in extreme circumstances. If it had a huge effect I’d think we’d have found it by now. No point in making yourself suffer, imo. If you feel like you’re doing fine without taking medication, I wouldn’t personally take any medication that I didn’t feel like I needed - all medications have some risk of side effects and such and my guess is that millions of years of evolution have given us a decent way of dealing with very mild illnesses that absent any evidence to the contrary, isn’t worth messing with.
I read a study a number of years back where economists (for one reason or another) wanted to measure the total effect of modern medicine on the community at large. I apologize I don’t remember more details of the study than what I’m relaying, so obviously take this with a grain of salt. So the economists did some statistical analysis on towns where the doctors went on strike, which happens rarely, but enough to get some good data. They found that the mortality rates and general health of the population improved in towns where doctors striked. A great deal of this was easily attributed to doctors not performing risky surgeries. That is, if you go on strike, then you’re not going to perform that double by-pass right away and so there’s going to be a false correlation between going to the doctor and dying prematurely. But, they found, that there was still a persistent improvement in the health of the population long after any obvious explanations could explain why that was. From what I remember, the general explanation seems to be just what I had mentioned before (this is the origin of my belief, after all). If you go to a doctor when you’re sick, he’s going to give you something for it because you paid him money and that’s his job. He’ll throw some antibiotics at you or whatever, even if the optimally healthy thing to do would be to wait a week to see if you had begun to improve on your own or if you were getting worse and needed to be given treatment at that time.
And of course there are numerous studies to show that both lab animals and people benefit from a certain level of exposure to germs. People (and lab rats) who are obsessively rubbing sanitizer on their hands every time they touch a doorknob have much poorer immune systems than those kids who played around in the dirt when they were kids. Obviously, there is a certain limit to this.
But this leads me to my very personal opinion that generally you should let your body do its thing if it’s not too much of a bother. Don’t be stubborn about it. If that untreated scab of yours starts growing yogurt, maybe it’s about time you saw a doctor about it. But, if you’re just a little sick, or you’re running just a mild fever, keep an eye on things, be mindful. And if it looks like things are getting worse and not better, or you’re suffering over something that doesn’t have so much of an effect that my doctor wasn’t able to say anything more than “it doesn’t really seem to matter” then go the standard medicine route.
Right now is a perfect example. I had a sinus infection that wasn’t getting any worse and wasn’t too bad. I took decongestants just because I hate sinus infections and I don’t want to make myself miserable. As my sinus infection started getting better I developed a cough, so I went and saw a doctor about it who gave me some antibiotics and stuff. I’m not trying to tough out pneumonia or anything. But I also don’t think it’s a good idea to see a doctor just because you have a runny nose for a day or two.
Thank you Expando for your interest in this thread. I don’t believe the OP was looking for a research paper. The cite I listed mentioned other studies. Yep, they were with rodents. Sorry if this information is not to your liking.
I did not encourage the OP to use this information to determine his/her medical needs. Simply provided a cite. It is up to everyone to investigate further.
Incidentally, the references on your single cite did not mention any “human” studies. But, of course we trust in that clinic, right?
Yours in good health.
Even if so, it’s a mechanism that would have been developed when we were in caves rubbing sticks together. I don’t know that a slight fever is going to be better than being able to take a couple days off work to lie down in a climate-controlled house with a fully-stocked pantry.
I’m pretty sure it’s against the rules to deliberately distort user names.
Then why did you link to a discussion of one?
It’s not.
Do we trust the consensus of medical belief on common issues of health? Yes, that’s more than merely appeal to authority; it’s best practice. Of course there is some disagreement about everything in medicine. And of course there are thousands of papers on every aspect of medicine and the body published every year.
Many of them suck. Perhaps most of them suck. Will all deference to Qadgop, who does not suck and is among the rare exceptions here of posters on medical issues, he and other actual doctors have to somehow sort through, digest, and act upon the advice that comes to them and they cannot do it by finding rat research. While it may be eventually invaluable, they can’t know this at the time and know or should know better than to ever do what you just did. The truth is that medical researchers publish reams of crap on a daily basis. In the course of writing several books I have spent innumerable hours in the bowels of a medical school library reading virtually every published paper on a subject and calling them chaff from which to extract enough wheat to make a few simple breads is giving them more than their due.
You can find damn near anything you want on Medline. Worse, you can find articles written about them and disseminated to the public based on every interesting paper that falls on a writer or editor with a hole to plug. We have trained the public to look at this overhyped nonsense and to make medical decisions based on exactly nothing.
I repeat what I said. This is worse than saying nothing. It is actively dangerous. I’ll be happy to stand on my soapbox and loudly repeat this whenever you or any other poster does it within my view.
And that’s contributing to good health.
Wow! You played the Qadgop trump card! What more can I say? You win!
Are you Mexican? Because I am and we use analgesics. Tequila has never been used as a pain killer.
Giving benefit of the doubt, I’m sure he was just trying to type XАРПО 