Medicine (Shade)

Medicine on Shade uses 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.

The rough categories

• 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.

Healers

Shade's magical healers work through a trance state, which gives them a unique perspective on the patient's body and allows them to detect and affect things imperceptible to the normal senses.

However, it must be understood that magical healing is not a replacement for non-magical methods. Broken bones need to be set, open wounds cleaned and protected and patients calmed before messing about with trances. Healers are not generally mystical or afraid of getting their hands bloody.

The healing trance is in large part a diagnostic technique. Its practical applications for a beginning healer include accelerating natural healing and clearing infections. Experienced healers may be able to cure a virus and do more exciting things.

The same techniques, if used maliciously or incompetently, can cause a great deal of damage.

Magical healing can't raise the dead or alter genetics.

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 -- hmmm.]

Dual-field healer-doctors, and communication between the two strands, subsequently become widespread. There is a general threshing of good science from superstition.

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