For All Of My Life,

I have always thought that a temperature of 98.6 was normal,

but in this study I have just read it is not, this month in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, refutes the age-old benchmark of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit,instead, Hausmann and his colleagues found an average normal temperature in adults of 97.7 degrees, as measured with an oral thermometer, (The published study uses results from 329 healthy adults.) As for fever, Hausmann found that it begins at 99.5 degrees, on average. Hausmann isn’t the first to push back on the definition of normal body temperature, but it’s been hard to topple 98.6 degrees,it remains on major medical websites, and where did we get 98.6 from?

 it started with an antiquated number based on a flawed study from 1868, (yes, 150 years ago), there’s no single number for normal, it’s slightly higher for women than men, it’s higher for children than adults, and it is lowest in the morning, "A temperature of 99 at six o’clock in the morning is very abnormal, whereas that same temperature at four o’clock in the afternoon can be totally normal," says Jonathan Hausmann, a rheumatologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who gathered 11,458 temperatures in crowdsourced research using an iPhone app called Feverprints,

and there was me humming this tune in my head for so many years reminding me of 98.6, thanks Keith!