Healing Enchantments

> *This post refers to the enchantments used to help the body recover on its own from disease or other long-term sources of damage. For magic that repairs single instances of damage to the body directly, see Healing Magic.*
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## Healing Enchantment

### Applicable Focus Themes

Healing, Helping, Fixing, Saving, Body, Health, etc.

### Uses

Doctor, Nurse, Medic, Vet, etc.

Healing magic is solely useful on acute, single-instance injuries. Most acute injuries are incredibly easy for a mage with the appropriate focus to detect and address because they result from a single, traumatic event. One problem, one fix, albeit a painful one. More complex medical problems, such as disease, overuse injuries, and aging, are impossible to fix with a single session of Healing Magic.

In this case, Healing Enchantments are used to help the body recover on its own and mitigate long-term side effects. It should be noted, however, that none of these are perfect solutions. Like any other enchantment, Healing Enchantments will wear off and need to be replenished at an increasing rate depending on how far the patient travels from the mage who cast it.

In addition to applying to the Enchantments field of magical study, Healing Enchantments fall under the same categories and focus themes that Healing Magic does; Life Magic.

## **Disease**

The healing enchantments used to treat disease work differently than the healing spells that fix localized damage.

While normal healing magic is simply a matter of finding and fixing a few individual points of damage, diseases don’t work that way. It’s not a matter of just “taking it out” like a tool that accidentally fell in a machine; diseases spread through your body on a microscopic level. As a result, trying to use normal healing magic on a disease is an exercise in futility. You can treat the damage and symptoms caused by the disease, but you can’t remove the disease itself. It’s simply too widespread.

Instead, mages use enchantments to treat diseases. Instead of rooting out and addressing the issue directly, these enchantments serve to weaken the strength of the disease itself, allowing the body to recover normally, but at a faster pace.

In short, while mundane medicines such as poultices, herbs, and potions are often more accessible and convenient, a healing enchantment is one of the most effective ways to ensure someone survives a severe illness.

## **Overuse Injuries**

Overuse injuries are the result of repeated, tiny amounts of damage caused by the titular overuse of a muscle, joint, bone, etc, and can also occur if an acute injury was not allowed to heal properly.  Just like a disease, an overuse injury is not a single instance of damage, but countless micro-injuries that would have to be individually detected and repaired. It’s much more efficient to use a healing enchantment to bolster the body’s natural healing process than attempting to directly heal all of these tiny injuries.

However, unlike diseases, it is technically possible to heal an overuse injury completely using the standard repair methods of Healing Magic. Unfortunately, the process would be a logistical nightmare. Healing magic is all about sensing something that’s fundamentally wrong, so the mage has to be a good enough healer to be able to detect such small damage in the first place. Assuming they are able to find every source of damage, repairing each individually would take forever.

Moreover, overuse injuries have the annoying habit of making themselves worse, turning them into chronic injuries. To give an example from my own experience, swelling in my ankle will rub against the other muscles in there, irritating them and causing inflammation, which makes it swell even more, and I think you can see where this is going. Therefore, if a magical healer wants to stand a chance at actually healing an overuse injury, the patient will have to try their absolute hardest to not move the injured limb. Which is easier said than done, and in some cases that won’t even stop the injury from exacerbating itself.

Therefore, the best way to treat an overuse injury is to use an enchantment to prevent the injury from exacerbating itself, allowing the body to heal on its own. Sometimes, this is used in tandem with healing magic if there are certain elements of the injury that can be healed to help this process. Returning to the example of my ankle, doctors are fairly certain that the swelling in my ankle is caused by an old fracture that never healed properly, leaving a fragment of bone brushing against the rest of my ankle joint. Any high-impact activity jostles that fragment around, causing swelling. If that fragment were removed, I’d still have to deal with the damage that it caused, but my body would have the opportunity to heal those injuries on its own. Therefore, a combination of healing magic to remove the bone fragment and a healing enchantment to speed along the body’s natural healing process would be a great way to magically fix my ankle.

## **Old Age**

Healing magic cannot halt, reverse, or slow aging because - while not identical - the aging process can be compared to one long, full-body overuse injury. However, Healing Enchantments can be used to allow older people to better recover from diseases that might have left them extremely weakened or dead. Obviously, not dying extends one’s life expectancy, while remaining hale prevents future illnesses or incidents from finishing the job. It doesn’t stop aging, it merely removes one common cause of premature death and extends the life expectancy overall.