Assessment of Fever : Physiology, Immunology and Measurement in Clinical Practice

When we say that someone has a fever, what do we really mean? Most people only take their temperature when they have a fever, and with good reason: fever is part of a larger response in the body.

Assessment of Fever, a problem-based learning (PBL) textbook, uses inter-professional discussions of scenarios from clinical practice to examine the question of body temperature. The authors start by examining the historical perspective and go on to consider technical measurement accuracy and thermoregulation from a physiological and immunological perspective. They address evaluations of body temperature and inflammatory activity in various conditions. They end by discussing how evidence-based knowledge can inform clinical practice, looking at different scenarios in the shape of case histories and realistic situations from clinical practice. These clinical scenarios are pertinent both in an inter-professional perspective in clinical practice and in the advanced education of health-care professionals, research scientists, and technicians. Each chapter concludes with a number of reflections and additional questions that the reader will be able to answer using the material presented in the book.

Märtha Sund-Levander and Ewa Grodzinsky are senior research scientists and university lecturers at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Linköping University, Sweden. They teach at the undergraduate, specialist, and advanced levels and have several years of clinical experience.