It can be scary when your child’s forehead feels abnormally warm to the touch. So it’s only natural for parents to stress over how to treat a fever in their child. But your impulse to bring that fever down immediately with ibuprofen or acetaminophen may not be the best move, according to a new American Academy of Pediatrics clinical report, published in the journal Pediatrics. The reason: Your child’s fever is a physiologic mechanism that has beneficial effects in fighting infection, so reducing the fever may actually hamper healing.

The details: Even when a child has a mild fever, many parents want to administer antipyretics such as acetaminophen and ibuprofen, according to the report. That’s natural; we all want to be reassured by that “normal” 98.6 reading on the thermometer. But according to the AAP researchers, there is no evidence that fever itself worsens the course of an illness, or causes any long-term neurologic complications. “Thus, the primary goal…should be to improve the child’s overall comfort rather than focus on the normalization of body temperature,” the report says. Continue reading →