The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers

Magical Resilience to Medical Malady

(1/4) > >>

WereElephant:
Magical practitioners live longer. They heal from things more completely than vanillas, injury or sickness. How completely does this "healing factor" cover things across the medical spectrum? Does it reduce or eliminate mortality rates for commonly terminal diseases, such as pre-vaccine smallpox, polio, etc? Does it prevent onset of things like dementia or Alzheimer's?

peregrine:
Probably it stops Alzheimer's and other dementias because if it didn't, at the lifespan Wizards get, they'd all be crazy after 150 years or so.

As for other stuff, it would depend on the disease I imagine.  It might keep someone alive long enough to let the body naturally build up an immunity.

Mr. Death:
I remember there's some WOJ on this somewhere, that they get sick, but they don't get as sick, and once they're over it they recover completely. I think the WOJ was in reference to stuff like the Black Plague.

Talby16:
Here is the WOJ on healing:

--- Quote ---(long ago) Disease, in general, was a lot more rampant and likely to kill you.  Yeah, wizards have the capacity to recover from things, but they don’t have any particular increased resistance to contracting a disease.  They just come back from it in better shape than regular folks.  For example, if you get a good case of pneumonia (like I did), you’ve got a reduced capacity to resist subsequent similar infections.  And that’s it.  In fact, having gotten pneumonia once gives you a pretty darn big mathematical probability that you’re going to die of pneumonia in the future.  (Pneumonia being one of the main things that actually does the killing when you’ve got cancer or other serious medical issues.)  Wizards don’t face that same danger.  If they beat it, they beat it, and it isn’t of any more consequence than getting over a cold.
But even so, before antibiotics, wizards were as worried about disease as everyone else was.  And a great way to not get diseases was to STAY HOME.  Which most of them did.
--- End quote ---

Alzheimer's is a neurodegenerative disease thought to be due to environmental/lifestyle factors. It is possible that a wizard would have those causative factors in play, but I would guess that his natural healing ability would slow down the whole process. It would be a race between healing and degeneration. Degeneration would most likely win in the end, but Alzheimer's would develop slower in a wizard and he/she would be able to live longer with it than a vanilla mortal.

WereElephant:
How about cancer? On the one hand, I could see this being affected like any other disease - slowed and made recoverable. On the other hand, I could also see the healing factor working out to the benefit of the cancerous cells as well, since they are technically part of the wizard. Too much of a stretch?

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page