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Childhood Fever, NO acetaminophen !



Fever and antipyretics (acetaminophen, ibuprofen)

I recently read an account of a high school classmate of mine, in the hospital again a few weeks after a gallbladder removal surgery, this time for pancreatitis. This 62-year-old really struggles with his health and try as I may, he is not open to learning about health, just more disease treatments because well, he is sick. He hasn’t been able to work for years. Cleaning the gutters for instance, causes him to have to stay in the house and rest for 3 days afterward.

His hospitalization last week for pancreatitis just seemed like another stroke of bad luck to him. Just one more thing in a lifelong list of bad luck health events. They aren’t. They are all bad behavior events. This example here, though mysterious to him and his wife, is quite simple to discern. If you remove the gall bladder (and that is an unusual situation in itself, but lets skip whether that was necessary or not for now), somewhere along the bile duct before it joins with the duct from the pancreas, you must cut to remove it. Doing so without damaging the common bile duct it joins that connects both pancreas and gall bladder to the small intestine, isn’t a sure thing.


So, a couple weeks later he has pancreatitis. Caused by the pancreatic enzymes, meant for the intestine, but they are trapped in the pancreas and “digesting” his pancreas. Very painful and life-threatening event. The hospitalization last week was to place a stent in the common bile duct to hold it open after damaging it while removing the gall bladder, so the digestive enzymes can drain to the small intestine like they’re supposed to.


The cholecystectomy procedure caused the pancreatitis and need for another hospitalization and duct placement. This cause and effect escaped my friend who just thought it a coincidence.


This theme is not unique to my high school friend. In contrast to the belief that medical treatment gets you well, it is quite frequent that the more medical treatments you undergo, the more you will undergo. Because, you will likely be made sicker rather than healthier.

My friend was released from the hospital and got home and 2 days later was quite concerned that he had a fever of 100.5 degrees. (Suffice it for now to say, I don’t even OWN a thermometer) but he decided that he needed to administer antipyretic therapy (acetaminophen) immediately to avoid complications of a fever. At this point, I thought, maybe I could help explain why fever is his friend and posted a paragraph about how it works and why stopping it causes more problems as well as the fact that febrile seizure in adults is even more rare than in children. But then his wife responded with “With fever it's a bit of a balancing act, though... You want the fever to be high enough to do its job, but not high enough to do additional damage.”


Agreed. “…to do its job” and not “additional damage”. Let’s talk additional damage.

The only damage that could occur from fever is a febrile seizure. Even if that DID occur, it’s not the end of the world. Rarely, if a seizure lasts 30 minutes or more, it can cause ongoing seizure disorder, like epilepsy. That is rare even in children let alone adults. So, we don’t care about the short seizure at all and are concerned that it could be a long one.


So, how often does this happen?


In looking this up, incidence of febrile seizure, I ran across this doozey from the Mayo Clinic’s website: “ A child can develop a low-grade fever after a vaccination. The fever, not the vaccine, causes the seizure.” Not to change the subject, but this is the kind of thing we’ve been dealing with over the last couple years. Looking at the data and calling it something else. It is challenging, without critical reading skills to interpret what you’re finding even on “reputable” sites like the Mayo. Fact: Vaccine causes fever. Fact: Fever causes seizure. In all other logic, chemistry or math for instance, if “A” =>”B”=>”C”, you can safely conclude A=>C.


As everyone knows after the last couple years, you don’t get to question vaccines. If you do, you will be silenced and banned. Which is why when you go to research them yourself all you read is rainbows and fairy dust. Because there is institutional and government collusion in lying about them and silencing the science that shows otherwise. It didn’t just start with the mRNA lies.


Anyway, back to the incidence of seizures with fever. They are most common in children and the cause of the fever is most commonly triggered by virus or vaccine (not my opinion by the way, this is 2022 research on the NIH website, here’s the study: “A Review of Febrile Seizures: Recent Advances in Understanding of Febrile Seizure Pathophysiology and Commonly Implicated Viral Triggers”).


The incidence is 2-5% in under 5 year olds and in this group the highest incidence is 1-2 year olds. Since we know they are triggered by vaccines, that’s ONE of the reasons.

Complications of fever they report, occur in rare cases where there are more than one seizure in 24 hours or a seizure lasts 30 minutes or more. This results in a higher likelihood of febrile seizure in the future. But, ultimately, the risk is “rare”, even for kids. It is even more so for adults.


Interestingly, years of parents being told to administer Tylenol to a child with a fever to prevent a seizure, has no basis in science. Yes, it reduces the fever, but here’s what the researchers found: “antipyretics benefits are generally limited to providing comfort to the child and do not affect the risk of future recurrence or severity (of seizure) (19, 67). Only one randomized control study in Japan has shown that rectal acetaminophen may reduce the risk of febrile seizure recurrence within the same febrile episode”.


What we know also about antipyretics like acetaminophen, is that they slow the white blood cell activity. In other words, they impair the immune system. So, if you’ve got a viral infection, take your temperature and decide you don’t like that it’s 100.5F or more, administer the acetaminophen, you are simply going to be sick longer because now the body has to fight the virus while somebody who knows better (generally the body owner or the parent of the body owner) intervenes and interrupts the immune system fighting the virus just so the thermometer reads correctly. Never mind that it makes you sicker, we’ve been told that temperature needs to be kept under 100.5F to prevent a seizure.


I’ve had this discussion more times than I can count. But, the fear that has been disseminated to moms on this causes them to medicate their kids regardless of the facts and science. Somehow, it just feels better to do something rather than nothing.


Adults are still adhering to this dogma for their own self treatment. I’ve noticed over my 31 years in practice that the people who do this, are the sickest and have the most diagnoses and are taking all kinds of other medications. Now that’s not cause and effect right? That’s just an association. It’s just an anecdote.

My point is, the body is smarter than we are. It does not make mistakes creating a fever when none is necessary. It doesn’t make it too high so that us smart body owners have to step in and tamp down the immune response because our body’s frankly, too stupid. But if you have kids and a birthing class, this is where it is taught at first. Fevers, fevers and seizures. Then after you have the baby, you never forget it because it’s reinforced at every “well” baby visit. Plus, your mother knows this to be true, your neighbor knows this to be true and everyone on the planet knows this too…. Except your great grandmother and your chiropractor.

One more thing about antipyretics and kids. If you DO “well child” visits and agree to the scheduled injections, do NOT administer antipyretics (Tylenol, acetaminophen) for anything. The ‘anything but vaccines’ effort HAS produced some science to show if you do this, your child will more likely be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. It’s the same math the Mayo uses. Vaccines cause fever and if the fever causes seizures, understand the vaccine didn’t do that, the fever did.

If the last 3 years taught us anything, it should have taught us to question EVERYTHING.


Dr. Barrett


PS Workshop on the topic is coming in August. The Well Baby Visit. How to Protect Your Baby


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