I don’t know if I ever shared this anywhere on the internet. But my body temperature is lower-than-normal. It’s always been that way. As a child, I could get out of going to school, if my temperature was 98.6°, because that was high for me.
My temperature is in the 97° range in fact. What could be the cause of such a thing? And what does it say about me, medically and physically? I’m not prone to frostbite e.g. Should I be? What does it mean?
And as long as I’m bringing it up, does anyone else on these boards notice a similar phenomenon in themselves? I just have to ask. And how (if anyway) does it affect your life?
My temp is usually about 98.2. Sometimes it’s 97.8. It seems to depend on when I take it. It runs 99 in the evenings sometimes, and is usually below 98 in the morning. But I didn’t get out of school for 98.6.
I’m similar - my temp averages about 36.5° C. I would guess that it’s because I’m very thin, with not much muscle and even less fat. No insulation, as it were. My wife tells me I’m a great source of heat.
Ms Napier is like this. Her typical temperature is around 97.0. She sometimes goes lower than that, without any apparent external cause such as exposure to cold, hunger, or anything else we’ve noticed. Our thermometers are mercury stick thermometers that are labeled down to 96 F, and the distance below 96 to the kink in the capillary is the size of one more degree, so if the capillary is uniform down to the kink it must be at 95 F. They read my temp as 98.6 which I believe. Sometimes she does not move the mercury above the kink, so her temperature is apparently no higher than 95, if this uniformity holds.
We have gone to the ER for this twice. She reported feeling funny, but not hot or cold. They worked her up for a suspected stroke but concluded that that isn’t the cause, and say it is unexplained. Her temp will come up gradually over maybe 3 hours to nearly her normal range, and they will let her leave. She’s a long term heavy drinker and I’ve found online references saying unusually low temps are somewhat common in long term heavy drinkers.
98.6 implies a lot more precision than what was originally measured or intended. The original “average” temperature was found to be about 37 deg C. If you convert that to deg F you end up with 98.6, but having a number down to the tenths of a degree implies a lot more precision that what is really there. “98-ish” would be more in line with the original measurement. Anything in the 97 to 99 range is normal.
What does 97 say about you medically? It says you are normal.
If your temperature is consistently down around 97 and you measure a temperature of 99, then that might indicate a mild fever for you, where 99 for someone else might just be their normal.
My temperature has always been low. My doctor would always measure it and say (jokingly) “yep, you’re dead”. Aside from jokes from my doctor, it has never had any other effect on me whatsoever.
It seems to be mostly women who say they “run low,” which would make sense. It’s dangerous for a fetus to overheat, so women might have a more precise mechanism for throwing off excess heat than men do-- but I’ll bet like most things, the “normal” temp is a male baseline, so it’s high for women. Exception: when women ovulate, their temperatures rise, which means that women will have greater fluctuations, while still being healthy.
I’m a non-drinker who runs low-- and back when I did drink, it was very lightly. Temp didn’t run quite that low, though. But pretty low. I think they tend to run lower in women, which could be compounded by drinking.
We’ve been taking our temps pretty much every day since the pandemic began and mine is always low, and not that consistent. I’ve been as low as 96.0 and as high as 97.9. That’s always been my normal though.
My wife’s the same way.
I would suggest reading 780.6. What is a fever? | Science-Based Medicine , because the world needs more Mark Crislip. He is a practicing Infectious Disease specialist in Portland, Oregon, and has been voted a US News and World Report best US doctor, best ID doctor in Portland Magazine multiple times, has multiple teaching awards and, most importantly, the ‘Attending Most Likely To Tell It Like It Is’ by the medical residents at his hospital.
He deals with fever every day, and he explains everything you really need to know about fever, including why 98.6 isn’t normal body temperature, except when it is.
UPDATE. I went to the doctor yesterday, and the nurse spot checked my temperature before I went in. She said it was 96 something, then she trailed off. That couldn’t be right, she said. But I assured her it was. As I said, my temperature tends to be quite low.
BTW I just had to ask. What is the lowest room temperature, resting, not sick, not frozen or dying, body temperature ever recorded? They probably got us all beat.
My Naval medical file has a huge banner telling the person reading it that my base normal temps will run anywhere from 94.6 F to 96.6 F and to worry if it is over 99 F. It took over a year of arguing with the hierarcy to get it done. At one point, since I was working on base, I went in every morning and had an ‘official’ baseline established over the course of 3 months.
I just went to the optometrist yesterday and they used one of those no touch readers on me. It popped 94.6. The lady stopped looked at me and then looked at the machine and ran it again and got the same reading. I don’t think I’ve ever checked me temp when I was healthy before so I don’t know if that’s normal for me. Hmm . . . I guess I should check and see where my home thermometer says . . . I just got a 97.4 and and 97.2. Not sure which one is off but I guess I’m cold blooded too.
I’m a woman, and I’ve always run low. Like low 98s. Into the 97 territory is not unusual. Even when I feel hot, my temperature is not that high. I get feverish feeling when I get a migraine, but my temperature is not elevated.
