Comment by imtringued
12 hours ago
Someone with a basic understanding of evolution and biology understands that evolution will take any free lunch it can get.
The vast majority of the time medicine can only ever help with (acute) symptoms and rarely the underlying cause unless it is something like vaccines or antibiotics.
Medicine has side effects because if there was a free lunch to be obtained from medicine, the human body would have synthesized the medicine directly. Hence medicine is always about making tradeoffs.
When it comes to general health, there is always a causal chain of cause -> primary symptom -> secondary symptom -> tertiary symptom -> ... and a lot of medicine tends to work on the secondary or tertiary symptom.
Pain evolved to be an accurate indicator of damage to encourage you to stop ruining your body and not a punishment.
I am forever astounded by the self-satisfaction of programmers as they talk about domains unfamiliar to them.
Just imagine someone trying to lecture a network engineer about how really async bugs should really never be different than bugs you see single-threaded if you use a semaphore. I mean, that's why we have semaphores!
Anyway, the temperatures attained during fevers are at best bacteriostatic (read not helpful in actually treating an infection that would lead you to seek medical care). If you've got evidence-based arguments, happy to counter them. Just please don't evoke 'evolution' to explain your bias-du-jour.
Evolution didn't create the personal computer or build a skyscraper. We're firmly in uncharted territory wrt things our bodies were evolved to deal with. As a great example, human temperature has been going down over time—evolution tells us that must mean we're all more susceptible to getting sick!!! https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/01/human-body-te...
This is a good argument, but it has a flaw here, which is that a systemic fever during illness may still be an evolutionarily beneficial adaption on average if there are a some situations where it can be the difference between life and death, e.g. bacterial pneumonia or sepsis, but that doesn't mean it's equally useful for all types of illness.
I did a fevered research dive last time I had the flu and came to the conclusion that there wasn't really any good evidence that fever is helpful for flu, and I should have few compunctions about suppressing it. (And that most of the situations where fever is really valuable for are ones where in the modern world you should go to a hospital and in the case of a bacterial infection be given antibiotics)