Medicine (Shade)

Medicine on Shade is roughly divisible into magical, scientific and alternative therapies. A practitioner will usually use a combination of these methods: a magical healer needs a good grounding in scientific medicine to avoid busting something up permanently, and alternative therapies often make use of magic as well as basic biological knowledge. Scientific doctors may not use either of the other strands, but are usually aware of them: sometimes when a magical healer has made a mess of someone, the only recourse is to call in another healer, and it helps to know when that is.

Practitioners

• Healers, slightly similar to witches, use magic and work intuitively and unscientifically. Magic has the fastest results in healing macro injuries. A clumsy (or malevolent) healer can quite easily kill someone in any number of fascinating ways, precisely because their field concerns itself with significantly manipulating the fundamentals of life and growth.
• Doctors are scientifically-minded and are usually the only practitioners concerned with epidemiology (the transmission and control of disease). A bad doctor may be overspecialised in outlook or unwilling to absorb new knowledge, but the good ones follow scientific method with all it implies.
• Alternative therapies range from the dubious to the bizarre. One advantage of eclectic therapists are that they are the most likely to offer their services for free. The drawback is that you're the guinea pig. (The 'alternative' label is perhaps unfair, because if a therapy has proven benefit it tends to be absorbed into mainstream medicine and not be 'alternative' any longer.)

Physician in its different senses can be used to describe any of the three strands, so patients are cautioned to use the word advisedly and make sure they know exactly what they are hiring.

History of medicine on Shade

The Twine Wars period is a time when unmagical sawbones are beginning to change into competent doctors. The explosion of knowledge in subsequent years has the effect of marginalising magical healers somewhat, though the knowledge is of great benefit to magical healing too.

Dual-field healer-doctors, and communication between the two strands, are finally becoming widespread around the Future-Shade timeframe. Many doctors are beginning to investigate alternative therapies with limited success.

Genetic therapies (and post-fertilisation screening/engineering) begin to be developed soon afterwards.