Timeline for Should we induce fever to assist healing?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
20 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 23, 2020 at 17:54 | history | edited | anongoodnurse | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
removed a dead link
|
| Feb 23, 2020 at 17:50 | comment | added | anongoodnurse | @not2qubit - It was fine 5 years ago; but thank you. It would be nice if it were still available. | |
| Feb 22, 2020 at 20:29 | comment | added | not2qubit |
Fever: facts... is a dead link...
|
|
| Jul 1, 2017 at 12:41 | comment | added | AMR | @sterid read Janeway's Immunobiology, then see if my statement makes more sense. Fever is a side effect of the cellular immune response, not a factor in the defense itself. | |
| Jul 1, 2017 at 9:32 | comment | added | sterid | @AMR "And based on what we know now of the immune system, the idea that hyperthermia was the curative agent is greatly suspect," Elaborate? | |
| Aug 29, 2015 at 1:32 | comment | added | AMR | The wikipedia reference is from a Science news article from November 8, 2013 by Gretchen Vogel. It is behind a pay wall, so some of the highlights: He initially tried with tuberculin and salmonella toxin, but there was no effect. To which he thought the fever was insufficient. Then he had a patient with Malaria, so he draws their blood and gives the disease to 9 patients. 6 improved. There was only about a 50% recovery rate, and 15% fatality rate. That implies 35% either did not recover sufficiently or got worse but did not die. And "No one is sure exactly how it worked..." | |
| Aug 29, 2015 at 1:06 | comment | added | AMR | Also, according to the wikipedia article on Malaria, "...the inventor of this technique, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries. The technique was dangerous, killing about 15% of patients, so it is no longer in use." | |
| Aug 29, 2015 at 0:57 | comment | added | AMR | However we likely won't know for certain, as medical ethics today would likely prevent patients from being subjected to treatment with a highly pathogenic parasite. | |
| Aug 29, 2015 at 0:53 | comment | added | AMR | if not disproven. The fact that an immune response was triggered and the leukocytes were called into action is far more likely a scenario. When the bacteria that cause neurosyphilis get into the CNS, they are in an immune privileged space, where, most of the time, WBCs cannot access. However with an infection as powerful as malaria, the immune response and all of the cytokines release make even the BBB somewhat leaky to immune cells, that can then hunt down and fight the infection. As with your reference to Jenner, they were on to something, but there wasn't proof for the mechanisms of cure. | |
| Aug 29, 2015 at 0:45 | comment | added | AMR | @Corvus In your rebuttal of anongoodnurse, you say "the claim "no studies...supported it" is badly at odds with the fact that a Nobel Prize was given for precisely such studies and so this seemed a correction worth making if we care about the faculty accuracy of biology.SE." This basically is saying that as a Nobel Prize was awarded, then the research which lead to the award was also correct, or even good. Moniz work was downright barbaric, but he won a prize. And based on what we know now of the immune system, the idea that hyperthermia was the curative agent is greatly suspect,... | |
| Aug 28, 2015 at 16:55 | comment | added | Corvus | @AMR. As I thought was clear in my comment, the whole point of my mentioning Wagner-Jauregg's Nobel prize was to say that were experiments on this, and that they were in fact well known ones. I was not vouching for Wagner-Jauregg's science one way or the other. With respect to anecdotal basic of treatment, this is medicine, not science. One could make the same critique of Edward Jenner. | |
| Aug 28, 2015 at 5:26 | comment | added | AMR | He used anecdotal evidence as the basis for treatment without knowing the root cause of the problem. His "cure" worked because it happened to be caused by infection of a pathogenic bacteria. From what I read it does not appear that he knew that he was using fever to treat a bacterial infection that caused symptoms of dementia in syphilis. That doesn't constitute good science. Then there is this gem: "Other patients were deemed schizophrenic because of excessive masturbation, where Wagner-Jauregg sterilized them, resulting in an "improved" condition." from Wikipedia article on Wagner-Jauregg. | |
| Aug 28, 2015 at 5:17 | comment | added | AMR | @Corvus... You seem to hold the Nobel Prize up to some biblical standard... How about António Egas Moniz developer of the Prefrontal Lobotomy and 1949 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine in Physiology for "for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses"? Wagner-Jauregg's treatments, while effective and a keystone in the development of neuropharmacological treats, were at best ethically questionable. Also he got lucky in that the cause of the Dementia was bacterial in nature. His research was looking to use fever as a cure for all forms of "insanity." | |
| Aug 28, 2015 at 0:27 | history | edited | AliceD♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
typo edit
|
| Mar 31, 2015 at 4:25 | comment | added | Stevo | This has really helped me get a direction as to what I need to look at, so thank you very much for this! I shall look at all of the references as time permits and see what they say. @Corvus If you have some stuff you would like to add in to an answer with some other references and ideas, that would be good. The more information I have that indicates relevant areas, the better! Seems like hyperthermia has a huge affect on parts of the body, as I expected. It seems like the answer is something like: Yes it is good in some cases with side effects, and no in others. | |
| Mar 31, 2015 at 4:14 | comment | added | Corvus | Once I get my head around the subject fully I'll be happy to do so. It's not an easy topic to synthesize because there are so many individual facts and study results out there, and so little by way of coherent explanation for the entirety of the phenomenon. The evidence seems overwhelming that fever hastens viral and bacterial clearance, but despite numerous conjectures there is no decisive explanation for the causative mechanism by which it does this. | |
| Mar 31, 2015 at 4:01 | comment | added | anongoodnurse | @Corvus - there is nothing, I assume, preventing you from posting your own well-referenced, better answer? | |
| Mar 31, 2015 at 3:49 | comment | added | Corvus | Hyperthermia isn't used for malaria--rather, patients were deliberately infected with malaria to treat syphilis because malaria induces high fever. Whatever the intent of your post, the claim "no studies...supported it" is badly at odds with the fact that a Nobel Prize was given for precisely such studies and so this seemed a correction worth making if we care about the faculty accuracy of biology.SE. More generally, having read a hundred or so recent studies about the effects of endogenous or induced fever on infectious disease clearance, I think you are dismissing hyperthermia too quickly. | |
| Mar 31, 2015 at 2:46 | comment | added | Corvus | "At the turn of the century, there were many who believed in the therapeutic use of hyperthermia in the form of hot baths, hot springs, and even injection of infectious agents to produce fever(!), but the practice has fallen into disuse, probably because there were no studies which supported it." Not so. Julius Wagner-Jauregg won a Nobel Prize given for his studies on malaria pyrotherapy. This approach was discontinued because of the advent of antibiotics, not for lack of evidence! | |
| Mar 30, 2015 at 23:26 | history | answered | anongoodnurse | CC BY-SA 3.0 |