Talk:Human body temperature

message: Body temperature depends on where it's measured.  I attempted to add this text, but the page seems to be "locked for maintanance"
Children have different temperatures (from the fever page of wikipedia) ... what are thos temperatures and normal ranges?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.217.82.96 (talk) 22:32, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Body

message: Please note that in your "Method of Measurement" section, you quote the following temperature:-
Temperature in the anus (rectum/rectal), vagina, or in the ear (otic) is about 37.6 °C (98.6 °F) 
Temperature in the mouth (oral) is about 36.8 °C (98.2 °F) 
Temperature under the arm (axillary) is about 36.4 °C (97.6 °F) 
There is something amiss with the first line (rectal temp), since converting 37.6 C to fahrenheit in Google yields 99.68 F, not the 98.6 quoted. So either the C or F temperature figure is wrong.
I hope this helps.
Drgao (talk) 00:59, 30 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error in Quoted Temperatures 

message: Against - core temperature seems to be about the liver, etc. in the core of the body.  This article is more about everyday measurement, the history of measurement, etc. - details that might get lost in the other.  Smallbones (talk) 21:11, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Still the difference between core temperature and mouth or armpit temperature must be made anyways in the article to justify the different values of each method. They can all fuse nicely in a single good quality article.Godot (talk) 21:25, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Re:merger 

message: See discussion here: Talk:Body_temperature#Merge with Normal human body temperature
I've made an attempt to preserve all content while minimizing redundancy and improving flow.  More work is certainly needed.  --Scray (talk) 04:21, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Merger of [[Core temperature]] and [[Temperature examination]] into [[Normal human body temperature]]

message: The introductory paragraph says the average temperature in the rectum or inside the body cavity is typically half a degree celsius, or 1 degree fahrenheit, higher than the oral temperature. But then below in the Methods of measurement section, it shows the temperature to be higher in the mouth than in the rectum, vagina or ear - please take a look at this, and make it clear, if it is in fact correct, that this is not a discrepancy. thanks ~ GoldenGoose100 (talk) 22:51, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the note.  I've fixed it, and listed the relevant sources.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:38, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: ???Thanks for the reply WhatamIdoing - but you haven't changed anything to the article in terms of content. The top still seems to be disagreeing with the methods of measurement section... ? GoldenGoose100 (talk) 22:48, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Oops, nevermind, you did take care of it - thanks for fixing! ~ GoldenGoose100 (talk) 22:54, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discrepancy 

message: where does it say what causes heat in the body to be produced and where in the body? we need to know that surely???  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.103.10.67 (talk) 20:51, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The information you probably want is at Fever#Pathophysiology.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:10, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: where

message: I have trouble determining whether the article means 36.8 C is the average oral body temperature over 24 hours or it's only the daytime average. It makes a big difference because the temp is low during the night. Anytime, the article is very useful. My daytime oral temp varied from 36.1 to 36.8. I got my blood checked and had low T3 which I corrected. Now my temperature has risen about 0.5 C and I feel much better and more energetic. 
PS: There should be a section on the flawed Broda Barnes method of measuring body temperature. His proposed minimum healthy temperature range was way too high, it didn't consider the average temp either. 93.161.106.58 (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 09:52, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: See Normal human body temperature#Variations, particularly the two sentences beginning "'Normal' values are generally given for..."  WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:07, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Average body temperature? 

message: Here it claims (without citation) that Fahrenheit set body temp at 100° , but all other articles I've seen say he set body temp at 96°. For instance, see Fahrenheit. Can someone verify? Markg17 (talk) 02:26, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes.  Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the  link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills.  New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:56, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fahrenheit's calibration point? 

message: It looks like the Fahrenheit conversions are incorrect or at least inconsistently rounded: 35.5–37.0 °C should be 95.9-98.6 °F not 96-99. If the C is rounded to the 10th , so should the F.
:Actually, they are consistently rounded, to provide three significant digits in the previous calculations ("101 °F", because the source numbers have three significant digits), and to provide the same level of precision (number of digits after the decimal) for all four F conversions.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:41, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Farenheit Conversions are Incorrrect 

message: If we're talking about an average and a range, then all numbers should show the range. I suggest we show one decimal place in these ranges. 
I originally started this article because people kept saying the normal body temperature was 98.6 (in the USA), and I wanted to know where the ".6" came from. It turns out that someone in Europe had posed 37 °C as normal. This value was then converted from metric units into English units.
In the USA, laymen (i.e., people who don't know much about science) often forget about the concept of a "range". Indeed, many Americans fail to distinguish between mean, mode, and median when talking about an "average"; I daresay most would be hard pressed to define, let alone calculate, these. (I'm currently teaching remedial math at a small private school in Harlem.)
Let's ensure that the article does not perpetuate any misleading ideas about what is normal:
*Indicate ranges (and sources for these ranges)
*Explain how 37 °C (i.e., "around 37 degrees Celsius") morphed into 98.6 °F
Fair enough? --Uncle Ed (talk) 13:44, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: What he said!  Stating that "average body temperature is 98.6°F" is FALSE both because it implies a level of precision that never existed and is based on an 19th century study in Germany.  Modern studies have shown normal average body temperature significantly lower than this.  --Lenehey (talk) 16:26, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: To be more precise, in the absence of systematic error, one increases the precision of a measurement with the averaging of multiple measurements. So even imprecise equipment, properly calibrated, on messy variables that you must sample evenly throughout the day, can be bumped to ok precision (and the best 19th century scientists were nothing if not diligent imo; I have no knowledge though to endorse this one in particular). However, in real-world use of this stat the most useful numbers to show are ranges, and as of writing this comment I think the article does this decently well. SamuelRiv (talk) 20:35, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Precision

message: I've removed the starting part that seems to be a weasel word in my view. I've gave rewriting it a go. -- JaymesKeller (talk) 20:40, 7 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Binning a weasel word 

message: A Spanish article specifically about human body temperature is necessary: Spanish-language article termorregulación includes both issues. --Correogsk or Gustavo (Eritrocito or Heme aquí) 02:33, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: "Human body temperature" and [[Thermoregulation]]

message: This article seems to be the best place to show the history of the 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit figure that quite a few generations grew up with. That figure is marked on old mercury thermometers. A possible source would be:
http://www.altmedrev.com/publications/11/4/278.pdf
If this history exists elsewhere in Wikipedia, a link would be useful.Fotoguzzi (talk) 00:37, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that the article Fahrenheit has what you are looking for.  --Hordaland (talk) 08:40, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  History 

message: How does the real and/or "accepted cultural myth" "normal" body temperature vary, from country to country, world-wide?-71.174.175.150 (talk) 23:09, 7 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Global variations by country 

message: Does the human body use an absolute temperature reference to establish and maintain the set-point? Basically I am asking how the body knows what temperature corresponds to (say) 98.6 degrees? When designing a mechanical control to maintain a system at some specified temperature T the control would need some absolute reference for that particular temperature. The body does a remarkable job of maintaining a stable temperature, through various homeostasis mechanisms, but how does it know what absolute temperature to drive towards? I hope this makes sense. Thanks! --Lbeaumont (talk) 20:32, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Temperature fluctuates through the day. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:19, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  True, but it fluctuates around a set-point at some absolute temperature. What reference does the body use to establish that absolute temperature? --Lbeaumont (talk) 12:31, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Does the human body use an absolute temperature reference to establish and maintain the set-point? 

message: The lead paragraph of this article says that normal body temperature (as measured by an oral thermometer) is 36.8±0.4 °C (98.2±0.72 °F), but the main text of the article says that it is 36.8±0.5 °C (98.2±0.9 °F).  The source cited by the lead says that the upper limit of normal is 37.2°C (98.9°F) at 6:00 A.M. but 37.7°C (99.9°F) at 4:00 P.M.  But these are 99th-percentile temperatures, so by the time the temperature reaches that level, something may already be wrong; therefore, I suppose that  (the number in the body of the article) may be a good value to settle on (in the lead) as the upper limit of normal.  Anyway, even though the body of the article explains these variations in more detail, in my opinion the article should be internally consistent, quoting the same range in the lead and the body.
72.66.65.72 (talk) 01:23, 15 September 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Upper limit of normal varies from 37.5 to 38.2 depending on the source. I typically go with 37.5 Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:03, 15 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  maximum normal body temperature? 

message: There's only passing mention of the hypothalamus's setpoint. An explanation of the mechanisum would be useful.
2605:E000:1C0B:129:7D2B:E424:1EDE:619B (talk) 17:45, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  hypothalamus's setpoint 

message: The text in the article states that "An individual's body temperature typically changes by about 0.5 °C" during the day. But then we have a chart on the right side (supposedly of a healthy individual) where we see a variance of 1.2 ºC. What's wrong? --Savig (talk) 10:14, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incoherence about temperature variance 

message: This article has 16 citations to two papers published in the Alternative Medicine Review. Both papers were written by a doctor of naturopathic medicine. In a 2007 discussion, this journal was found to perhaps be reliable since it was listed in pubmed, but I doubt it would pass the current WP:MEDRS standards. Most of the information cited from this journal seems reasonably accurate, so I'm leaving the information in for now. However, the  tag needs to remain until we can find better sources. Billhpike (talk) 00:54, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: New discussion New discussion on RS Noticeboard Billhpike (talk) 01:11, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Weak Sourcing

message: Under Measurement methods:   "Generally, oral, rectal, gut, and core body temperatures...".  
This is the only place in the article where gut is mentioned, and there is no reference given.   And how is gut temperature measured, anyway?
Pollifax (talk) 19:41, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Gut temperature

message: This WSJ article refers to a long-term study done at Stanford University, which established the average body temperature for modern-day humans has declined over the last 2 centuries, to 97.5. The study was published in eLife. ~Anachronist (talk) 14:58, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Human average temperature has been lowered to 97.5 

message: In the "2.2 Measurement methods" I changed "otic" to "tympanic" to reduce confusion since the term "otic" is not used anywhere else in the article. Also, while "otic" is somewhat correct, that is, "anything relating to, or located in the region of the ear", (Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary) tympanic is "pertaining to the tympanum (the eardrum)" (MedicineNet.com) which is specifically where in the otic region the measurement is taking place and therefore a more precise term. (Kenyoni (talk) 20:19, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Otic vs Tympanic 

message: A discussion is taking place to address the redirect :37°C. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 November 12#37°C until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.  signed, Rosguill talk 16:46, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "37°C" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: A discussion is taking place to address the redirect :36.6. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 November 13#36.6 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.  Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 08:26, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "36.6" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: A discussion is taking place to address the redirect :98.6°F. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 November 13#98.6°F until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.  Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 08:28, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "98.6°F" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: A discussion is taking place to address the redirect :98.6°. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 November 13#98.6° until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.  Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 08:28, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "98.6°" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: Someone on reddit writes:
:Believe it or not but the modern average temperature is around 97ºF range. The previous average of 98.6ºF was determined back before we had a number of critical modern medicines. The elimination of things like chronic parasites, chronic minor infections, etc. resulted in a reduction of the average temperature by a degree or two.
I had never heard that before and the article doesn't mention it.  Is there some reasonable sourcing?  If yes, it should be added.  Thx 2601:648:8202:350:0:0:0:C115 (talk) 19:45, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Normal temperature 

message: This article and hyperthermia variously spell the term as , , or .  Some consistency would be nice, in order to make it easier to use one's browser's "Find text in the current page" feature. 2A0D:6FC2:6A92:3F00:0:0:0:5F9 (talk) 12:56, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  temperature setpoint