Dr. Suzann Wang: Hello, thank you for joining me. Today, I am talking about fevers and how to deal with colds and flues without the use of antiinflammatory such as Tylenol, Ibuprofen, Aspirin. In children, a lot of pediatricians recommend that as soon as your child has a fever to break it with Tylenol and my recommendation is not to do that mainly because the immune systems reaction or fighting up the cold is the fever response. So, if you break the fever, your cold, it takes a lot longer to get rid off. So, you find that your child is doing a lot of sniffles or runny noses, coughs that don't seem to go away, those sorts of things. It's mainly because the body has had no time to deal with the bacteria or virus usually through their normal mechanism, which is the fever.
So, my recommendation is if your child or yourself have a fever, you want to try and allow it to run for as long as possible before breaking it and hopefully not raising it at all. We try and keep it about 104 as the maximum and to prevent the risk of Febrile Seizures, but some kids spike fevers really, really quickly, so you parents want to keep an eye on them. But a lot of kids, they kind of have a low grade fever of 100, and then moderate fever 101, 102, 103 and they usually -- some kids are a little bit lethargic or something. If your kid seems to be going and getting higher and higher in terms of their fever, you want to put them in a tepid bath and let them kind of cool down. Tepid meaning, the temperature is not too warm or not too cold so that their bodies can -- it will help to keep the fever temperature down.
Also cold wash clothes, two ice cold or very cold wash clothes to the forehead and to the back of the neck really helps as well. So those are some things to do and otherwise just keep them comfortable and let them sweat and that really allows the fever mechanism to work and allow the body to heal itself. So that's my recommendation. I hope you join me next time for further discussions on various health topics. So, I thank you for joining me. Have a great day. Bye.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services