Reviving this from the last forum:
kel said:There are several of us who play medical officers, and we tend to do it with widely varying styles. Cavane, for example, when treating a patient with broken bones and severe burns across much of their body, gave the patient drugs to lower their blood pressure and thus stem blood loss, requested skin grafts for the burnt area after removing the crunchy bits, and injected her with various substances to help the bones mend before sticking her in the hemosynth tank. In the same situation, I would have assumed that the neko's compartmentalized circulatory system would minimalize the blood loss, removed the crunchy bits, and left the rest to a hemosynthesis tank.
He and I approach the same problem from two very different angles: he used a treatment fairly similar to what would be done in a modern hospital, whereas I'd assume that the hemosynthesis tank would take care of much of it. For any given problem, just about any medical officer is going to treat it differently, because the players all have different ideas about how neko/Yamataian bodies and the medical technology in the setting work.
Take another example: The situation Mara, on the Miharu, is currently in. She took a blast through the chest, destroying her lungs and presumably her MSS organ (presuming she even had one to begin with--neko anatomy is another issue altogether). She also lost a leg, leading to massive blood loss. Since she has no lungs or MSS organ, her breathing and blood replacement are both severely crippled. She's in shock, and has possible spinal injuries.
Now, from my point of view, the best treatment for this would be to rush her the hell to a hemosynth tank, then use it to force oxygen and nutrients through her skin to stabilize her as it repairs her. Other people would probably say this is insane--moving somebody who's in shock runs a risk of killing them. Moving somebody with spinal injuries too quickly can worsen it and paralyze them below the injury. My rebuttal here would be that her compartmentalized blood vessels will probably keep her brain perfused better than a human's would in the same situation, and her internal hemosynthesis will fix up the spinal injuries if she lives. But yet another school could argue that she might be able to respirate enough through her skin to keep herself alive, and that Miyoko could spend as much time on-site giving her blood transfusions as she wanted.
The point I'm trying to make here is this: what one player has their medical officer character do can seem downright nonsensical to others, because we are all approaching medicine in this setting with widely different opinions. It doesn't help that we have varying levels of medical training. So, what I'd like to propose is this: some sort of usergroup or thread for people who play medical officers to get together and discuss the specific cases, so we can reach some kind of consensus on treatments that make sense. It'd also be a good resource for asking the various 'do you think [such-and-such piece of medical technology] exists?' questions.
Wes said:In a triage situation people who are probably going to die anyway could be allowed to die if needed and later reincarnated via memory backup. For serious but non-fatal injury, nutrient-rich blood the #1 thing a neko needs. For minor injuries, Nekovalkyrja shouldn't even be treated by doctors.
In a non-triage situation, the hemosynthesis tank is really the best thing you can do for a Nekovalkyrja, because they depend on that blood for most function. Blood loss is one of the leading causes of neko death (under antimatter-related trauma). UNder most circumstances the Neko body will fix itself given time and resources.]
Yeah, that's been one of my general assumptions--my cures tend to be fairly quick at getting people into the tank when compared to others', it seems. Particularly since it can also take care of blood loss, detoxification, and oxygenation... it's just about a panacea.
Triage and other situations where 'just stick them in the tank' isn't necessarily an immediate option are where this kind of thing would be more useful.
Yangfan said:Perhaps we could standardize several styles of healing? I would assume that a Nepleslia-trained doctor would have very different methods and priorities from a Yamatai-trained doctor.
Now, the more chemical / drug-reliant approaches of a Nepleslia-trained doctor might work just fine on Nekos, but a Neko doctor might have a hard time treating Nepleslians, since humans are just so much more fragile than Nekos.
And of course, this is not to suggest that Kel's idea doesn't have merit. I believe that it would be time well spent for the players who RP medics and doctors to get together and "get their story straight".
