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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6165535" data-attributes="member: 17106">I happen to work in medical research (before hopefully attending medical school), and have spent significant time working on traumatic stress, particularly in a military context, as well as having a college background in psychology with a focus on forensics and relationship violence. I also have my own personal experience with the lasting effects of psychological and physical traumas. So yes, I've got some opinions on the subject.***The glibness with which the word "healing" is used is not limited to an rpg context by any means. Modern medicine is often expected to fix health problems as if they were mechanical malfunctions. Sometimes this expectation is realistic, but usually it is not; especially as it pertains to chronic, multifactorial illness. While we conceptualize wounds, infections, neoplasms, and psychiatric diagnoses as an illness that exists distinct from the person affected, this is not truly the case; the person's own mind or body are in fact part of the problem. This isn't a value judgment, simply an observation of fact.For example, truly "healing" the wound caused by a broken leg involves not only repairing the damage to the bone and surrounding tissue, but also managing the pain, preventing infection, relearning how to walk, and perhaps making behavioral changes (to reduce the risk of reinjury). It may also involve overcoming fear of reinjury, relieving the financial consequences of the incident, dealing with the social role change associated with being injured, and addressing a variety of other psychosocial factors. If someone broke the person's leg, that raises another set of things that need to be healed. And this is just one leg.In many cases, complete restoration is difficult or impossible, and "healing" may refer to making the person feel whole, even if some ailment remains. In many other cases, nonphysical wounds exceed or persist even in the absence of physical ones.In a game/story context, we have conflicting pressures, wanting the game to be playable and the story to be engaging, but also wanting to connect to it. My perspective on these issues is always to start with reality and then simplify or change as necessary to fit the needs of the game. Clearly, that isn't the perspective of many game designers.And, as well as the games themselves, I see players who seem somewhat inured to the effects of violence, and don't take it seriously enough. So I do agree with the premise here; I think the ease with which word "healing" is used cheapens the thing being healed, and wastes both the tactical gameplay implications and the human drama that true wounds and true healing would demand.</blockquote>

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