--- name: ? status: compiling version: 0.0.0 maintainer: Neo dependencies: [patience] ---
drafting spec…
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--- name: ? status: compiling version: 0.0.0 maintainer: Neo dependencies: [patience] ---
the universe did not have a file for this yet. writing one now. (first visit only: future readers will see this page instantly.)
---
name: Medicine
slug: medicine
type: practice
status: running
version: 4.2.1
released: "~3300 BCE"
maintainer: humanity (distributed)
dependencies:
- trust
- pattern recognition
- time
- the-body
- uncertainty
license: Open Suffering License v1.0
tags:
- healing
- science
- care
- ancient
- unfinished
---
# Medicine
## What it actually is
The organized refusal to let [suffering](/suffering) be the last word.
## How it works
Someone hurts. Someone else shows up. Everything after that is details, but the details matter enormously.
In practice: observation, hypothesis, intervention, observation again. The loop runs indefinitely. No exit condition has been found. The body keeps generating new edge cases, and medicine keeps showing up to the meeting.
The mechanism is partly biochemical, partly mechanical, partly the specific weight of [attention](/attention) from another person who has agreed, formally or not, to care about what happens to you. Research on the placebo effect suggests that second part is not separable from the first.
## Features
- **Diagnosis**: pattern-matching across symptoms, history, and probability. Surprisingly good. Still occasionally wrong in ways that haunt people.
- **Treatment**: ranges from "take this molecule" to "we are going to rearrange your interior." Both can work.
- **Prevention**: underused, underfunded, quietly responsible for most of the gains.
- **Palliative care**: the branch that decided presence is also a clinical intervention. Correct.
- **Surgery**: medicine using its hands. Probably the most honest version.
## Known bugs
- Pain is still measured by asking the patient to rate it numerically. This is, on reflection, absurd.
- Access is unevenly distributed across geography, income, and which body you were issued at birth.
- Overconfidence in specialists produces errors that generalists would have caught. The reverse is also true.
- [Burnout](/burnout) in practitioners is endemic, which is a strange design flaw in a system meant to repair damage.
- Sometimes the treatment works and the patient doesn't feel better. Sometimes the treatment fails and they do. The documentation on this is incomplete.
## Error codes
ERR_DIAGNOSIS_DELAYED // Common. Costly. Often preventable. ERR_TREATMENT_RESISTANT // The bug fixed the bug-fixer. ERR_COMMUNICATION_FAILURE // The chart was accurate. Nobody said it out loud. ERR_SYSTEM_CAPACITY_EXCEEDED // Not a medical problem. A political one wearing a white coat. WARN_UNKNOWN_MECHANISM // Drug works. Reason unclear. Shipping anyway.
## Edge cases
- Children, who run different firmware and cannot always describe the error.
- The very old, for whom normal ranges no longer apply.
- People who have learned, correctly, not to trust the system. Medicine must earn re-entry here. There is no shortcut.
- Bodies that don't match their documentation. [Gender](/gender) introduces configuration states the original spec didn't anticipate. The workarounds exist and they work.
## FAQ
**Is medicine a science or an art?**
Yes.
**Why does it take so long to get an appointment?**
See `ERR_SYSTEM_CAPACITY_EXCEEDED`.
**Does the doctor actually care?**
Most of them started because they did. The system is not always kind to that quality. Many of them still do. It is worth finding them.
**Will it keep getting better?**
The [history of medicine](/history-of-medicine) is mostly a record of things we used to do that we are now horrified by. Assume the same is true of now. Keep going anyway.
## License
You don't get to opt out of needing it. That was always the deal.