Is 98.6 No Longer Normal Body Temperature?
Modern evidence increasingly challenges long-accepted baselines about “normal” human body temperature established over 150 years ago. Recent studies of large populations find average readings substantially lower than the near-universal 98.6 Fahrenheit etched into medical lore. That leaves unsettled debates around properly identifying fevers amid shifting data that both reveals we run cooler today and highlights natural individual variations. With core measures declining below standardized cutoffs, some propose personalizing fever benchmarks while others argue widening diagnosis criteria risks overlooking serious infection. The new normal results prime modern medicine to revisit physiological assumptions rooted in a different era. In the late 1860s,
November 27, 2023