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Magical Resilience to Medical Malady

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Dashkull:
Alzheimer's boils down to cellular regeneration but the root causes of it are genetic. If it were some extrenal thing the body could fight off, maybe a wizard would be "immune" to it. But if it is something they are born with it would still effect them eventually. If the body is making defective cells because the genes are telling it to do so, thems the breaks.

However we dont understand the disease all that well. It is clear that damage to the brain from things like head trauma can accelerate or even possibly be the cause of it in some cases. So if it was caused by that, the wizards would have much more insulation from the effects.

Honestly, Jim has a ton of leeway in how it works, because of how little we understand about the disease and poor understanding of the human brain in general. In this case, it is very easy for it to just be whatever he says goes and it will still make perfect sense. So to that end, we know from WoJ that Wizards CAN get it (and related things like dementia) but likely will get it much later and slower. And that fits just fine with the story.

RobReece:

--- Quote from: Talby16 on June 14, 2018, 04:37:50 PM ---
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.

--- End quote ---
I think that since a Wizards cells make such perfect copies of themselves, that would almost negate the chance of any degeneration.  Also my understanding is that one of the ways to prevent such degeneration is to make sure your brain stays active to constantly look at things differently creating new pathways of thought, that's almost a given for someone working with magic on a daily basis.  So if the lifestyle is a contributing factor to the diseases origin, then their lifestyle would strongly prohibit it's inception.

Talby16:

--- Quote from: RobReece on June 21, 2018, 05:47:07 PM ---I think that since a Wizards cells make such perfect copies of themselves, that would almost negate the chance of any degeneration.  Also my understanding is that one of the ways to prevent such degeneration is to make sure your brain stays active to constantly look at things differently creating new pathways of thought, that's almost a given for someone working with magic on a daily basis.  So if the lifestyle is a contributing factor to the diseases origin, then their lifestyle would strongly prohibit it's inception.

--- End quote ---

At some point the perfect copying mechanism wears out. Otherwise wizards would not age at all. My read is that everything is slowed down for wizards. Aging and degenerative changes included.

Quantus:
It would help against anything that is actual Damage, acute or accumulated, so degenerative diseases would likely get fixed with time.  Purely genetic disorders would likely not, since theoretically your body is following the correct script, it's simply poorly written.  The grey area would really be things like cancer that can have both a genetic component as well as environmental aggravators.  As a datapoint on that, after his diagnosis my fathers oncologist told him that a male human WILL die of Prostate cancer unless something else gets us first.  It's simply an end-game failure mode of our bodies. 

Bacchus:
Yes but what I'm saying is that the genetic component IS that your more prone to your body making bad copies for these things, no mater what your genetic component is it takes a full lifetime of your cells constantly replicating and doing it worse each time for you to get these. i believe the ends of the DNA chains actually start to get lost after a long life.


Genetic disorders that you seem to be talking about are things like heart valves formed incorrectly. if it brakes something critical you die, if it breaks other stuff you have whatever problems from that.  thats not a replication error, thats a blueprint error.
 The environmental factors lead to things being tougher on the cells and they may start to have runaway broken replication sooner(cancer).
wizards would only have to be super careful about things that could kill a person rather quickly like poisonings, radiation etc on the environmental side,

like for smoking the epithelial cells in the lungs that get damaged by the smoke get replaced by a different type that is more prone to cancer, alvioli grows back thicker and not very good at its job. but even with smoking only half of smokers die from smoking and it takes a LONG time in most cases.


Also i wouldn't worry too much about Alzheimer's and dementia for plot reasons
There are literally dozens of other mental disorders that are also barely understood and don't seem to be age related any any way.
and since we know this stuff only helps for so long, anyone senior council age would start to become susceptible to all this stuff again.

 To be clear im just theorizing with all this

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