system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Can a fever actually turn the tide in an immunologic battle that the human body would otherwise lose without the aid of medicine?

Read a lot about it but couldn't find an answer or a more proper subreddit to ask this, so hoping this doesn't get deleted. 

For clarity: can a fever be THE causing factor behind the human body winning an immunologic battle against an infection that would otherwise cause death or other permanent type of harm without the help of medical treatment?

I know the question is very specific and it might be hard to find someone who knows the answer.

If you provide a positive answer please specify against which pathogens does a fever actually enable a turning of the tides if you can.
gpt
There's a fairly clear mechanism that applies to a broad range of viruses. While we often handwave and say that viruses hijack our cells mechanisms to replicate, that's ignoring a very important detail: Most viruses bring their own methods of copying their DNA/RNA. Those enzymes (usually polymerase or reverse-transcriptase) are generally not super robust versions and they tend to be pretty sensitive to temperature.  Even a few degrees difference can make a big impact on how quickly/accurately they're able to copy genetic material.

So, to the question: Can that result in a fever being the factor that lets the body win? Not really... But that's mostly because you're thinking of it as some sort of crime scene where we need to select that one weapon that resulted in the primary cause of death. It's not. The immune system is a battle on many fronts and all sort of layers are involved. Their goal is not to find the one thing that really shuts down an infection. The goal is to overwhelm an infection from multiple sides so that there are no avenues of survival (for the infection).

To that end, a fever can be very helpful for some diseases. It doesn't outright destroy many bacteria or viruses, but it can drastically slow down their ability to spread/grow/replicate. That then opens the door for lots of other mechanisms to overwhelm the sluggish infection. That said, the effect is useful in some cases, and not so much in others. That's why we generally don't have a problem with suppressing fevers, particularly when we're fighting the disease in other ways. Our bodies are also sensitive to temperature, and its often more important to protect that than to leverage a fever for a leg up on a disease.

Now, one more thing to note: The fact that polymerase is temperature-sensitive ends up being important in one other way: Viral-vector vaccines or attenuated-virus vaccines often leverage this mechanism to create viruses that look dangerous but cannot really infect us. The vaccine will use a virus with a polymerase that --for example-- has an optimum temperature of 95F rather than 99F. That's enough difference that the virus in the vaccine can barely replicate and the body has no problem at all preventing the infection. However, the vector still works and the body recognizes it as a disease to build immunity to.