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Showing posts with the label Julie Parsonnet

Just my thoughts #0756

Real change happens so quickly that we often don’t notice when it occurs. The changing of seasons is a good example. Clearly, winter and spring are very different. It’s hot during the day and cold at night, but when we see spring flowers blooming along the roadside, we realize spring has arrived. We tend to think that big changes will feel different, but sometimes small signs reveal the change. For instance, when our foreheads sweat even with little movement, we recognize that the temperature is getting warmer. What changes might you not notice or recognize? Perhaps your weight? - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”

Just my thoughts #0049

The "normal human body temperature = 37°C" standard was established in 1851 by the German medical doctor "Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich", who took millions of temperature readings from about 25,000 people and reported "36.2°C to 37.5°C". However, surveys in the United States in 1992 and the United Kingdom in 2017 found 36.8°C and 36.6°C, respectively. So in the past people deemed that the discrepancy was due to errors in old measuring equipment or methods. But Julie Parsonnet and her colleagues at Stanford University's School of Infectious Disease Epidemiology found a common thread in the temperature databases: People are cooler now than they were then. It wasn't just a measurement error. They speculated that medical advances had reduced inflammation and lowered the average temperature. We don't question the obvious. - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”