It is 5:39 AM and I didn’t make it to the gym this morning due to my oldest being unwell. He ran a fever last night and I had my first experience on how fevers cause a terrible nights sleep. It was one full of talking in his sleep, night terrors and tossing and turning. I learned that even if a kid coughs during a night terror they still do not wake up.
I now know what it was that I once experienced as a child. Reading up on night terrors they are not remembered the next day but there is one that I do remember. Around age five I remember jumping on my bed, crying in terror in the middle of the night as monsters around my bed tried to hit me with sledge hammers. It was one of the worst experiences I’d ever had as a child and being a kid without much experience in the world I had no explanation but never forgot it. Watching my oldest open his eyes, shaking in fear but after some conversation realize he was still dreaming – his answers were not something he would have said normally – was a disturbing experience for me until I learned what a nigh terror was.
He seems to be sleeping peacefully now and so I’ll check to see if the fever remains once he wakes up.
Now I’m not a doctor but from what I read fevers are a good thing as they raise the body’s temperature to kill whatever bug is causing problems. This was known even to the ancients as Hippocrates said:
Give me the power to create a fever and I shall cure any disease.
What I cannot understand is why once a fever occurs in modern times parents/doctors want to immediately bring it down with medicine. This seems rather counterproductive to me. I understand that severe fevers can be dangerous and we’d certainly want to bring it down if the fever got even remotely near dangerous levels but wouldn’t taking medicine on a normal fever impede the body from killing off the bug?
I told the wife I didn’t want to give him Tylenol right away and to let the body do its thing and hopefully the fever will have knocked out the bug and then subsided this morning.
I do have to say that Doctors irk me a bit in this day and age. When I was a kid and sick the remedy was to stay in bed and eat chicken soup for a while. Now, doctors want to prescribe all kinds of medicine and I’m not entirely sure this is the correct path. There seems to be two extremes, as well with some parents refusing all medicine, even vaccines, which is absolutely idiotic but on the other hand doctors always want to over-prescribe medicine which I blame on the pharmaceutical industry who must ever increase sales. I remember returning to the USA and was shocked at seeing a young man from the industry sitting in a doctor’s lobby setting up various propaganda for drugs sold by his company. It served as a reminder at the stronghold the industry has over the medical profession.
At 38 years old I’ve had almost no health problems but am sure that if I had run to the doctor for everything I’d be on a series of drugs for aliments which all have resolved themselves by eating healthily and exercising. Not only would I be on drugs but I’d have to wear a mouth guard at night since that is what my dentist recommended and I’d be nearly blind as my eye doctor would forever be prescribing stronger contact lenses. A few years ago I decided that annual trips to the eye doctor were unnecessary for myself – my eyes are fine but I still want my family members to go. And sure enough the eye doctor keeps prescribing my wife stronger contact lenses and her eyesight keeps getting worse!
As a salesperson and living overseas I was able to recognize how with eyes, the situation seems reversed with the medical profession having control over the contact lens industry. In the USA one cannot buy contact lenses without a prescription which I assume is the result of lobbying by doctors groups in that their service is a requirement which precedes the ability to buy contacts. I find this ridiculous and for many years have bought mine from Chinatown which makes no fuss about a prescription.
So in short, I do not have the freedom to buy contacts and require a prescription which would continually call for stronger contacts leading my vision to continually become worse. Seems like a story from the Twilight Zone doesn’t it?
This leads me to the state of affairs in the USA where our entire system is built on selling more and more products and services; if this were not to happen our economic system wouldn’t work very well. Stocks would stagnate, people would be poorer and hell, it might encourage support of an entirely different economic model which the rulers of our nation – the mega corporation – would certainly not like. With the Citizens United ruling these corporations now buy the politicians who make the laws and this is a very negative thing for the majority of the population – half of which is too dumb to realize it.
A vote for the Republican Party is a vote for the corporations and with wealth increasing for the 1% and all but stagnating for others it would seem voters would be smart enough to realize we’re on the wrong path. How many people have lost jobs, been forced to switch jobs, or couldn’t even find a job over the past decade. The financial crisis and housing crisis should have been a firm ‘wake-up’ call but it was not and we’ll repeat this cycle again.
Well, look at that, I started off by talking about a fever and ended up talking economics and politics. I’ve bored myself with this and am signing off to perhaps get a few more moments of sleep before the entire house wakes up.
