Medication to Bring a Fever Down

Video Transcript

"DR. SUSAN JEWELL: Hello. My name is Dr. Susan Jewell, and on behalf of Expert Village today, I'm going to talk to you about ways to treat fevers and how to reduce the symptom of fevers. Now in this clip, we're going to talk about medications, specifically over-the-counter medication that you can buy readily in the local drug store or the pharmacy. Besides that, prescription medication, for example if you have fever and you know it's a cold, a bacterial infection, and you have fever, then you're going to get prescription medication from the doctor and antibiotics, and that would help. But also, if you know it's just a simple cold or flu, or you have fevers that you could try temporary relief you can get over-the-counter drugs. Now here, medications you can get, for example NSAIDs, for example acetaminophen, and Aspirin, Tylenol are popular brands that you can buy over-the-counter on the shelf in drug stores to help you to at least temporarily reduce the fever and reduce the temperature in the body. So, most of these medications have what we call "antipyretic" which is, it means it reduces the temperature of the body down, and also anti-inflammatory and analgesic because sometimes when you have high fevers, you have the accompanying symptoms of aches and pains, especially if it's viral or bacterial flus and fevers, and so you want to get some temporary relief with these drugs, over-the-counter. Here, I've given you a display of some of the popular drugs that you can buy in the store, and for children, specifically when they have high fevers, they don't really want to--they're very fuzzy about what they want to ingest, or put in their mouth, so you can try to buy some like more popular children's brand of medication, but here I have an example of Cold Eeze, and it's a bubble gum, so for older children of course, not for infants, where they can chew the bubble gum; If they are able to and they don't have vomiting then they can take this medication this way. Also, you can have children's. Make sure that for elderly and the pediatric or the children's age group, that you give the right dosage of these over-the-counter medications, so always follow the advice and recommendation on the package, and read it first to tell you how much of the medication you should give to the children, the infants, and also the elderly. And the other thing like, of course, the Aspirin is very good, that you could buy that would help. It has antipyretic to reduce the fever temperature and for nighttime, of course, when you are having a hard time for sleeping, you can get drowsy; induce sleep with some of this medication. For example, here's Contac for severe colds and flus; that also will help to reduce the fever."