This is interesting, I didn't know 37° is considered normal in the US. In Ukraine where I grew up as a child (and I imagine also other post-USSR countries), 36.6° was always taught to be the norm, and 37° typically considered an onsetting light fever. However, the typical measurement was always armpit and not oral - maybe that explains the difference.
As a child (Italy) I was taught that the temperature measured outside the body (armpit) would be usually 0.5C lower than the one measure inside the body (rectum, mouth).
The threshold for "fever" as reported on all old mercury-based thermometers was exactly 37C and that was referring to the "inside" termperature.
So 36.6 outside would definitely be considered onset of mild fever, not normal. 36.6 inside would be a-ok
> In 1851, the German physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich obtained millions of axillary temperatures from 25,000 patients in Leipzig, thereby establishing the standard for normal human body temperature of 37°C or 98.6 °F (range: 36.2–37.5°C [97.2- 99.5 °F]) (Mackowiak, 1997; Wunderlich and Sequin, 1871).
The adjective "axillary" means "relating to the armpit", so armpit vs. oral doesn't explain it.
Presumably many patients have abnormal temperatures, so to figure out the normal temperature from patient data would require some kind of filtering.
A couple ways to do that come to mind. One would be to only use patients who are there for things like an annual checkup.
Another way would be to include everyone and then do a graph of x = temperature, y = number of patients with that temperature. I'd expect there to be a peak centered at normal temperature, and another peak at whatever the average fever temperature is.
If whatever method he used was not able to exclude from the "normal" group people who are just starting to get sick and are at the stage where their temperature has started to rise but they are not aware that they are getting sick, he'd get a slightly too high result.
36.6°C is the more modern number:
> A compilation of 27 modern studies, however (Sund-Levander et al., 2002), reported mean temperature to be uniformly lower than Wunderlich’s estimate. Recently, an analysis of more than 35,000 British patients with almost 250,000 temperature measurements, found mean oral temperature to be 36.6°C, confirming this lower value (Obermeyer et al., 2017).
98°F is a common reference, and that is about 36.6°C. 98.6°F is a more precise (not necessarily accurate - I don't know either way) measurement that I hear, and that's exactly 37°F.
I wouldn't be surprised if 36.6 is correct, people rounded that up to 37, converted to Fahrenheit, and we just converted back to Celsius.
98.6°F is an over-precise conversion of 37°C. The number was originally measured as 37°C, with two digits of precision. It shouldn't have been reported as 98.6°F, though a correct rounding would have been even less accurate: the number is closer to 98.2°F/36.8°C, but the proper rounding of the conversion would have rounded up to 99°F.
There is, of course, significant variation from person to person, so two digits of precision is probably all that's really appropriate.
> But when at the doctor nurses will always mention something like 37.2 as not indicating sickness.
Note though that they may not be wrong, even if you're sick and you know it from that temperature alone: 'indicating' is a term of art.
More than just 'based on this it does/doesn't seem to be the case that' it means that a specific (guideline-given, perhaps regulated) set of criteria have or haven't been met that tell them whether a certain procedure or whatever should be ordered.
It doesn't mean they can't also listen to what you're saying, and proceed as though it was indicated , making a judgement on that basis.
Nurses are often surprised when they come across someone with an unusual baseline.
Several times after measuring my father’s resting heart rate at <40/minute, a nurse has gone to fetch a doctor out of fear he might have some serious health problem
