This is not going to be what you probably think. It’s not about politics. It’s not about climate change. It’s about this:
Your “normal”
temperature, 98.6 degrees isn’t normal anymore. And no one can figure out
why. That 98.6 figure was established in about 1850 when a cabal of
doctors and makers of mercury thermometers at a secret meeting in Leipzig,
Germany declared it so after sampling 25,000 local residents.
Imagine the power of
that small group of Leipzigers! They helped make a decision that has
affected billions of people for 170 years, give or take.
Average, normal body
temperature is accepted as fact right along with 32 or 212 degrees at sea level
are accepted as freezing or boiling. It was not to be trifled with. At least not until now.
The physician-Insurance
company complex periodically admits that “average” doesn’t mean universal.
They do that the same way they admit the existence of pharmaceutical
side-effects… in whispers and fine print.
There are people whose
regular temperature varies by a degree or two either way. But scientists at
Stanford have been working for a long time, sampling temperature records of
people who were alive between the 1860s and 2017, using Civil War-era data
collected before the school was established and then gathering its own.
And what have they
decided? Well, the statistics show that over time, the average male temp used
to be about one and a half degrees higher than today. The average female
temperature was about half a degree higher. So 99.6 for men and 99.2 for
women. They don’t report directly that men lost 1.06 degrees and women 0.57
degrees instantaneously on August 18, 1920, the day American women were first
able to vote.
Now, you might argue
that today’s thermometers are more precise and they are. But the decline
over time has been measured in round-ish figures. So while the exact numbers may be off, the
downward trend is not.
Is the decline because
we’re all on Obamacare? Nah. Is it because we’re just generally
healthier? Nah. Is it because we’re evolving faster than we realized? Who
knows? But probably not.
The real reason is one
of simple logic. Follow this: If the starting premise is wrong, the logic
can be perfect, and you still may get the wrong answer. In this case, the
starting premise was wrong. What premise? The so-called normal temperature =
98.6.
But that still doesn’t
explain why average/normal declines about one half of one degree every ten
years or so. As reported by Vox and other sources, the way we heat our
homes can be one factor. If the house is warm in winter, the body doesn’t have
to work as hard to get to its optimum temperature.
But if that’s true, what
about the people who live in extreme heat almost all year? Air
temperature in Phoenix, Arizona rarely gets below 65 degrees in the course of a
year. But average body temp is falling at the same rate there as it is in
Minneapolis where 32 degrees in December is considered a heatwave.
And if that’s not
mysterious enough for you, try this: Your own personal normal can vary
with your age, your weight and the time of day, just like your blood pressure.
That’s comforting in a way. It means various internal systems work similarly.
Body functions in harmony with one another are, well, harmonious.
But in an era that’s
obsessed with data, it’s also unnerving to have to adopt a sliding scale of
“normal” as opposed to the rock-solidness of 98.6.
I’m Wes Richards. My
opinions are my own and my “normal” body temperature is 97 and change and
you’re welcome to either.
Please address comments
to this rock-solid datapoint: Wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2020 (or maybe
2018-2028)
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