I'm going to side with Eva and see that mundane medicine and magical healing are two different sides of the same healing coin. Magitek medical devices might bridge the gap a little, but when it comes to healing magic, this is how I see it:
On the battlefield, you're taking mostly superficial damage. When you're dropped to low HP, you aren't losing any speed, agility or strength, so you really aren't that hurt yet. Being reduced to 0 HP means you are now seriously hurt, and you need some major intervention to repair yourself. It's a way of handwaving the Critical Existence Failure aspect of RPG game mechanics.
So the fast, rapid-fire healing that conjurers and white mages perform in combat is basically combat medicine--quick, dirty, stop the bleeding and throw 'em back into the fray. It's not going to cure things like decapitations, limb amputation and the like.
When it comes to serious injuries, I'm not of the mind that magic is impotent, but that the effort required is significant. Raising the dead takes a truly powerful healer who must sacrifice a great deal of their own energy, perhaps even permanently, to re-anchor the lost soul to this reality. Amputations, serious wounds, horrible diseases? All of these should be able to be cured via magic, but at the cost of significant investment of power and resources, with multiple extremely-powerful healers working together.
Mundane and magical medicine aren't a linear sliding scale with magical healing the superficial and mundane handling the grievous, but they're actually different methodologies, different routes to the same destination. Serious life-threatening wounds shouldn't be "easy" for even the most powerful of conjurers to heal.
For example, in most D&D rule sets, raising a PC from the dead requires a significant investment of energy, resources and materials. The character being raised from the dead loses a full level of experience, a point of Constitution (that they can NEVER get back unless they use a wish or miracle spell) and the priest who does the casting has to expend a chunk of their own experience points as well as material components that are extremely high in value. On top of all of this, the spell itself takes a long time to cast, and the body has to be in good condition--if it's gibbed or disintegrated or melted into goo, the raise dead spell will fail to work, and a much more powerful version (true resurrection, or a wish or miracle spell) must be cast.
I'm not really seeing how this is "easy" just because it's magic and not mundane.
On the battlefield, you're taking mostly superficial damage. When you're dropped to low HP, you aren't losing any speed, agility or strength, so you really aren't that hurt yet. Being reduced to 0 HP means you are now seriously hurt, and you need some major intervention to repair yourself. It's a way of handwaving the Critical Existence Failure aspect of RPG game mechanics.
So the fast, rapid-fire healing that conjurers and white mages perform in combat is basically combat medicine--quick, dirty, stop the bleeding and throw 'em back into the fray. It's not going to cure things like decapitations, limb amputation and the like.
When it comes to serious injuries, I'm not of the mind that magic is impotent, but that the effort required is significant. Raising the dead takes a truly powerful healer who must sacrifice a great deal of their own energy, perhaps even permanently, to re-anchor the lost soul to this reality. Amputations, serious wounds, horrible diseases? All of these should be able to be cured via magic, but at the cost of significant investment of power and resources, with multiple extremely-powerful healers working together.
Mundane and magical medicine aren't a linear sliding scale with magical healing the superficial and mundane handling the grievous, but they're actually different methodologies, different routes to the same destination. Serious life-threatening wounds shouldn't be "easy" for even the most powerful of conjurers to heal.
For example, in most D&D rule sets, raising a PC from the dead requires a significant investment of energy, resources and materials. The character being raised from the dead loses a full level of experience, a point of Constitution (that they can NEVER get back unless they use a wish or miracle spell) and the priest who does the casting has to expend a chunk of their own experience points as well as material components that are extremely high in value. On top of all of this, the spell itself takes a long time to cast, and the body has to be in good condition--if it's gibbed or disintegrated or melted into goo, the raise dead spell will fail to work, and a much more powerful version (true resurrection, or a wish or miracle spell) must be cast.
I'm not really seeing how this is "easy" just because it's magic and not mundane.
attractive enmity device
