Medicine

[Uandir]

Not sure where to post this,so I will just post it here. What is the level of medicine in Arad relative to RL?

[sona]

Seems to be poultices and herbs by my observations and experiences. It will likely remain as such until alchemy is finished. Alchemy has been on the todo list for a long time. Other than 'traditional' medicine, there's also clerical healing.

[Uandir]

So things like Surgery,cells etc are unknown?

[sona]

I'll let someone with more knowledge make a firmer statement on this, but I don't think so, I've not heard of blood donation services, or microbiology. not knowing blood types, and having blood services would probably nix most forms of surgery. C-sections might be attempted during child births, but I think survival rates for the mother would be a bit low on that. That's just my thought.

[Kunren]

Could eventually be something along the lines of surgery for rooks, with their knowledge of the human body. For anyone else though I think it'd be a bit out of reach.

[Fayne]

I dunno, I think surgery is possible, but not in the way we would think about it.

I would expect that surgery would be a combination of traditional and thaumaturgical healing combined. Rias would have to go into specifics, but we do know that thaumaturgy can regenerate lost tissue, to the extent that we've seen bare-boned skeletons get revived with no issues. This means that most surgery needed due to trauma is unneeded unless a monk is unavailable.

Now, surgery due to disease would be a bit more tricky. Thaumaturgy wouldn't heal a disease, since it would be recognized as the body's "natural state." Most diseases that affect organ functionality are probably lethal I'd imagine, since I doubt they'd even be able to detect most of them. And then, if they could, the question that comes up is do they use thaumaturgy to regenerate the removed organ? But wouldn't that just give them another diseased organ? If that's not an option, can they perform transplants with the aid of thaumaturgyto ensure they heal quickly, without infection, and that their bodies don't reject the new organ? I dunno, it's an interesting question, since thaumaturgy eliminates many real world issues.

Then again, the monks aren't everywhere all the time, so maybe it's rare for anyone with a severe problem to get a monk's assistance. But in that case, when our own characters' bodies get badly or even severely injured, they are considered to be bleeding to the point of "bad horror movie special effects." Players also regularly get arms and hands caught in the sawblades when cutting logs into flitches, which would really tear them to ribbons, if not cut them off entirely, and yet poultices are able to heal them up just fine without so much as a scar. So obviously regular healing is a bit different from the real world as well.

So I guess the real question is, what are the limits of both herbal and thaumaturgical healing?