Of the PT Persuasion: Healing Magic
Have you ever wished for a resource that helped writers cut back on hours and hours of researching how to accurately portray injuries and medical conditions? Look no further. In this blog series, I’ll be discussing just that. What makes me qualified to do so? Well, I’m a Physical Therapist! Or, rather, I’m a writer…Of the PT Persuasion.
Fantasy writers—come one, come all! You might be wondering why you need to pay attention to character injuries when your characters can just get healed by magic. Well, truth is, you should be paying a lot of attention. Most of the character injuries I see that make the least sense are in fantasy books because the author relies too heavily on healing magic as a crutch to not do research. What it comes down to is this: if you have human or humanoid characters, you need to understand how injuries work on the human body, regardless of magic.
Because, guess what? Your healers have to understand how the human body works in order to perform magic on it. This isn’t to say you need to know everything about how it all works—that’s what I’m here for.
In order for healing to happen, someone or something has to know what’s going on and how to fix it. This isn’t a spontaneous reaction, folks; there has to be some decision-making rhyme or reason. This can be the healer, the magic, or the patient’s own body.
The healer: they’ve gone to school or apprenticed and practiced for years and have a firm understanding of how the body works, what is injured, and what systems need to be fixed in order for full and functional healing.
Pro: in-depth worldbuilding and unique character complexity; relatable to real-world
Con: the healer requires years of training and practice and can still make mistakes
The magic: there is some sentience to the magic that allows it to understand the problem and how to right it.
Pro: fastest method which requires the least amount of healer experience
Con: presumably, your entire magic system would work this way, making it difficult to control
The patient: the healer is able to use magic to channel into the patient’s body to hasten or boost the patient’s natural healing response
Pro: this taps into natural systems for simplification
Con: it won’t work as well because some things can’t be healed well naturally—think of setting a broken bone—or because the human body makes mistakes in healing—think of cysts, keloid scars, abcesses, or other growths
It’s important to choose a type of healing magic that will complement the rest of your magic system. If your healer draws on the patient for healing structure, then one might assume people with magic can only channel magic from external sources; for example, someone with fire magic would need fire first before being able to manipulate it. This brings into question if your magic system derives from an internal, external, or third-party source. It doesn’t matter which you choose, just make sure your magic is consistent across the board.
Regardless, you, as the writer, have to understand the injury and what’s affected. This allows you to write better dialogue, portray symptoms accurately, depict the incident of the injury correctly, and describe the healing process better.
So, what are some of the things you have to understand?
What is the injury and how does it happen?
Does the injury align with the mechanism of injury?
What are the structures involved?
What are the symptoms?
What is the prognosis and is there any immediate danger?
What are the potential sequelae if the character cannot get immediate attention?
Having a baseline understanding of these questions lets you increase the accuracy of your writing and can give you an idea of the amount of energy the healer has to expel in healing (based on the complexity of the injury) and the amount of experience the healer needs to perform the healing.
On that line of thought, let’s think about the healer’s experience level. What if the healer only knows the basics of healing? What are the basics? Are they able to heal the injury or condition enough to stave off re-injury or harmful sequelae? If not, what does a half-healed injury look like? Well, that takes us back to: you have to know how the human body works to heal itself naturally. And let’s not forget to ask: What if the healer messes up??
That opens a whole new can of worms that we won’t broach today.
Regardless of your healing magic and the healer’s experience, the fact remains that the human (or humanoid) body has certain reactions to injury. Think: pain, swelling, inflammation, limping, guarding, etc. Your character is still going to experience these symptoms. The body reacts a certain way to trauma, both to teach us not to get into harmful situations again and to protect us while we’re healing. Unless you do away with those instincts, your character will face very real aftereffects like fear avoidance (not doing any activity with the injured limb for fear of re-injury, even after it’s healed) or more complicated diagnoses like Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome (the injury has completely healed, but the body keeps sending pain signals—it’s not uncommon in wrists, hands, ankles, and feet!).
It’s important to take these things into account for the accuracy and believability of your story. Now, you don’t have to include these things in your writing, but it’s important to know of them and realize the complexity of medical conditions. After all, your healer is likely aware of these things.
We’ve covered a lot, but there are still some other questions you should be asking in regard to your healing magic:
Where is the material coming from? If a character is bleeding out, where is the healer getting more blood from? Are they creating more from the patient’s own or transfusing? If a character tore a muscle, is the healer repairing it on a molecular level or patching with new muscle?
Can you expect a full recovery? Can the healer make the patient as good as new or does the patients have to do some healing themself, too?
How much training does the healer have and do they specialize? There are so many different body systems and types of healing; it’s nearly impossible to know them all! That’s why real-world doctors specialize in certain areas—so they only have to know one facet of medicine.
Once the healing is done, what about the nerve connections and movement patterns? Especially if an injury is old or chronic, the brain actually patterns differently to adapt to the injury. Is your healer planning on changing the hardwiring of your character’s motor patterns, too? Or will the character need to continue rehabbing like we do with physical therapy?
What structure is involved and how does it get healed? Healing soft tissue (muscles, tendons, ligaments, skin, etc.) is a lot different than healing bone. You also have to consider, what is it attaching to and what else is involved?
If a healer can affect the body, what else can they do? Hurt, injure, kill? If a healer can manipulate body systems, then they certainly have the ability to do harm or even to kill someone—even if it’s by accident. This happens in medicine, too; despite doctors’ good intentions, they can still make mistakes that lead to harm, or even death.
Where does the power come from? Is the person just a conduit for the magic, which knows all, or is the healer able to bend magic to their own will?
What is the consequence for using magic? Does this energy come for your character’s own reserves (internal source), from the patient (external source), or from an ambiguous “well” of magic somewhere in the ethers?
All right, so there’s a plethora of food for thought! I’ll give you one last thing to consider, and it’s this: readers love involved, complex, and understandable magic systems, and the best way to make a magic system understandable is to make it relatable! And, well, what’s more relatable than real-world accuracy?
Thus concludes our all-encompassing review of healing magic and how to write them appropriately.
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this installment to Of the PT Persuasion.
Disclaimer:
If you’re seeking medical advice for yourself or someone you know, you should speak to a medical professional. This blog is not intended for diagnosing or treating real-life medical conditions, only fictional ones.
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