How stress can cause a fever

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00873-0

 

Is a transient rise in body temperature the same as a fever? Is there evidence that their presumed ‘psychosomatic conditions’ involve symptoms that are the same as stress responses in rats?

Certainly in ME there are disturbances in temperature regulation for some/many, but subjectively for me these are distinct both from fever and from ‘stress making me feel a little hot under the collar’. Subjectively my problems in relation to temperature relate to delays in matching my body to the external temperature, delays in responding to changes in external temperature, a possible hypersensitivity to extremes of hot and cold (both can trigger post exertional malaise) and night sweats.

The closest my temperature issues get to a fever, stress induced or otherwise, is night sweats, which only occur when I am asleep. Unsurprisingly I am not usually experiencing particularly high levels of stress when unconscious.

I have made these remarks without having bothered to read the article, and hopefully the authors would not include ME in their understanding of ‘psychosomatic conditions’ but surely you would need an adequate physiological description of any condition prior to even considering this stress response in rats as a animal model for the human condition(s).

 

Does this mean that stress can now be successfully treated with cheese?

I've tried cheese, in varying forms, the only result of eating cheese, when feeling the need for cheese, is that you have less cheese.

 

That's really the gist here. It's equating two superficially similar things based entirely on superficial traits. It doesn't make it invalid, it's just not the thing they think it is. Which they should be aware of but the psychosomatics belief system pushes all ambiguity in the same direction. The same way as an elevation in heart rate could be described as anxiety, if one is looking for anxiety and squinting to make it out of the noise.

I'm not well-versed at all on this but as far as I know there are two things that conscious, or subconscious, thoughts can change in the body that have been demonstrated: heart rate and body temperature. This is something monks trained in deep meditation can do. With enormous effort, definitely not something one can do casually. But that's about it, those are the two physiological things people can change with their minds in a significant way. Somehow "some things are possible" is twisted in "all things (we want to be true) must be possible", a logical fallacy.

This study is a great example of the fallacies underlying psychosomatics. It sees basically two possible things and extrapolates based on superficial similarity that it must mean everything is possible. Even though only two things of small importance have been found to be, in extreme cases, somewhat possible.

Which is sad because it makes a deeper understanding of those processes almost impossible with all the woo that it becomes wrapped into.

 

Experiencing a rise in body temperature doesn't necessarily cause fever. Stress does bring on hot flashes/night sweats, but my actual body temperature remains normal. It might rise a little but only for a very short period. After that I feel chilled, no amount of blanket/duvet can warm me up.