Articles by Dr. Erdman are for informational purposes, and are not to be taken as specific medical advice.
Some ideas we are taught as facts may have been true at some
point in time, yet may not currently be accurate. Take global cooling in the
1970’s. It was true then, yet in the 1990’s we’ve had global warming, and now
we have globally static temperatures for about a decade or so. These are facts
whether you acknowledge them or not.
It’s the same in medicine and healthcare; things change.
I’ve learned since my first health class that the normal body temperature is
98.6°F.
Do you have any idea when that number came about, and how it was determined? It
was done simply by measuring thousands of people’s body temps and getting the
average, and was done in about 1850 here in the United States.
But recently, Stanford University undertook a large-scale study to
evaluate whether the norm established in 1850 is still accurate.
They evaluated data from multiple decades since then. Some using
military records from the civil war, some from a nutritional survey done in the
1970’s, and a database of research from 2007 to 2017. A total of 677,423
measurements were developed.
They determined that men born in the 1990’s had average body temp
1.06° F lower that men from the 1800’s. Women were 0.58° F lower.
The numbers suggest an average lowering of average body temp by
0.05 ° F every 10 years. But Why? They suggest that we obviously have changed
over time. Our environment is different, like our house temperature. Our
contact with organisms is different and our food has changed. Many of the
medications people are taking, such as ibuprofen and statins, affect body
temperatures.
Another research team analyzed a six-year study that tried to
determine if there is any correlation of an individual’s body temperature
variations and mortality.
Out of 35,488 patients from large teaching hospitals without
infection, fever or having been prescribed antibiotics at the visit,
researchers determined that variations in body temperature can predict trouble
in the near future.
What this means is that by regularly taking a very accurate
reading of your body temperature, you can predict if some adverse health
condition is occurring in your body. Obviously, you need to account for regular
fluctuations due to illness, medications etc., but if you chart your baseline
temperature regularly and you see a pattern of change, you need to examine the
cause.
Generally, with those whose temperatures are going down, the
normal cause tended to by hypothyroidism. Those whose temperatures were going
up tended to be gaining weight or having a diagnosis of cancer. That means
tracking body temperature could save your life by predicting a cancer diagnosis
prior to any other symptoms.
Everyone’s “normal” baseline body temperature varies
significantly. The only way to know is to accurately track your own temperature
over time. But the average of all people has gone from 98.6° F to 97.88°F over
the last 150 years.
If you’re going to start tracking your own temperature, you need
to take it at roughly the same time every day, use the same instrument, in the
same manner (oral, arm pit, rectal) and consider all factors before concluding
anything is severely amiss in your body.