Zombie ! :smack::smack:
Well, zombie body temperature is usually around room temperature. I’ll leave it to you to figure out why.
I have a related question, are there any people out there with medical expertise who can explain how they evaluate a patients body temperature in light of the fact that body temperature isn’t an absolute, but relative with some people having a higher or lower natural body temperature? When a nurse in the ICU checks a patient temp, how does she factor this in for example?
Presumably they look for a temperature significantly higher than the normal range of temps and they’d also look for other symptoms such as sweating and chills.
Yeah, but I’m asking what they would consider the normal range?
When I was a boy growing up in Britain in the 1950s and '60s, I am sure that I learned that normal body temperature was 98.4̊ F, and this was what was marked on the thermometers. The notion that it might be 98.6̊ F never crossed my horizon until 1967, when the song of that title, by the American singer Keith* (as alluded to above by Mr. Kapowzler) entered the hit parade. Indeed, I can remember being quite puzzled by the song at the time as, by my understanding, it was off by 0.2̊ F.
This raises a number of questions: Do British people today take “normal” temperature to be 98.4̊ F or 98.6̊ F, and, if the latter, why and when did this belief (or the underlying facts) change? (OK most British people today probably use Celsius, but if they were still using Fahrenheit what would it be? Also, I understand that there is actually a range of normal human body temperatures, but surely the median ought to be fairly well defined.) Did things change sometime in or following the late 1960s? (And, if so, might Keith have been responsible, as Mr. Kapowzler implies?) Were British people in the 1960s actually cooler than Americans? (The history of popular music lends some support to this conjecture.) Are they still?
*According to the relevant [Wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_%28singer%29), he was born James Barry Keefer, but "He legally changed his name to Bazza Keefer in 1988, in memory of his mother." What a lovely gesture! :dubious:The 98.6 figure came from Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich. In 1861, he measured the temperatures of twenty five thousand people and came up with a mean of 37.0 °C (98.6 °F), with a range of 36.25 °C (97.25 °F) to 37.5 °C (99.5 °F).
Your body temperature also fluctuates during the day, by about 0.5 °C. You are coldest at about 4 a.m. and warmest in the mid to late afternoon. Your own body temperature can also vary by about 0.5 °C from one day to the next.
As with all “norms”, different hospitals have slightly different scales, outside of which you’re supposed to take action (or at least keep an extra close eye on it). Generally speaking, normal oral temp is 36-37 degrees C, or 97-99 F. It depends though. Older patients tend to have lower temps than younger patients. Obviously, sick people tend to run fevers, and a low fever (under 101) doesn’t generally worry us too much unless the person is immunocompromised, on chemotherapy or has some other medical condition in which a *slightly *elevated temp is a red flag. I don’t treat my or my kids’ fevers unless they go above 101.2, on the advice of my pediatrician. (Well, 101 would concern us in an ICU, because it’s a sign of infection, but it wouldn’t concern me in an otherwise healthy person with an acute viral illness.)
But for a more direct answer to your question: we look at what the temperature is over time. If you run “low”, and I’ve got charts from yesterday that show that and you’re showing no other signs of infection, I’m not going to worry about it. Temperature alone, whether a little high or a little low, is rarely a cause of concern all by itself, but it can help us when taken into account with other information.
Thanks WhyNot, that was exactly the kind of info I was looking for.
Mice actually have multiple stable temperature set points. Their ‘normal’ temp stabilizes differently depending on external conditions.
-lotso refs online, but I’m posting from a portable…