You give me fever....

The sickies have hit our household hard this week and the babe has developed his first fever. I ran across this WHO article last week (very timely), which calls into question the use of fever reducers. Now I am generally the type of person who uses medication as a last resort....except when it comes to fevers? I'm not sure where it came from but I always freak out when my children develop them. I start envisioning seizures and brain damage......you get the idea. Well this articles basically states that there is no evidence that the use of fever reducers is beneficial and may in fact be detrimental to your child's health. I was flabbergasted....What? Apparently your body will not produce a fever high enough to harm itself except in the cases of poisoning or large open wound infections. In fact fevers are indeed good for your body and are one of it's strongest weapons against viruses and infections, by giving a fever reducer you are taking yourself out at the knees. Now this all sounded good in practice...but then my children got fevers. So I took deep calming breathes...slowly stepped away from the medicine cabinet and let the fever run it's course. Everyone's fevers had broken by the morning and the Tylenol was now resting comfortably in the trash. Our bodies truly are amazing and know how to heal themselves...if we let them.