It has been a long time since I wore a Mending Physicians robes, the idea has been suggested several times but I am weary of becoming too engrossed in the Healing Practices. Healing and Medicine are logical sciences and they appeal to me, but they are applicatory at best and rarely is the Physicians Sanctum grounds for scientific discovery.
Yet bills must be paid and a living must be made.
I have a modest fortune, this is true, but how long does ones fortune last when the world is moving towards full-out war? How long does ones savings stay saved when they too go out to battle and find that the price of a simple cloth-mending has sky-rocketed into the realms of whole-gold prices?
I have reopened my private psychiatry practice and while I find it good to have work beyond experimentation to do, I find myself having to choose which group of interest will serve as economic ballast and which will serve as a fertile grounds to play ones pre-applicatory efforts.
To say I am without a conscience would be prudent, I may harbour no free wish of well-being towards my fellow man but I contend the idea that this makes me sociopathic...I am merely frugal.
I left medical practice when Den'ethinus died. Without him I would have to have found myself sharing synaptic avenues with the very types of 'wisemen' we both so despised. Pity was the man who feigned rapport and the healing touch in the golden vein of aquirement. Pity was the man who thrust himself upon the fallen and was pinned to the pile eternal.
What were we? We would not practice in a Hospital. We would not practice with a firm. I still will not practice in a capitalistic privacy per say. The crown pays more than enough for my time.
The sudden in-flux of patient clientele has me somewhat puzzled. Are there really so many suffering from abberant brain-structure? Or has the war really succeeded in eating away at the meager sanities of common men?
I had come home in hope fo continuing the physical work, the math...the basics of matter. But now I find myself drawn to the intangible matter ... the very master of the sensory organs...the Brain...and furthermore...that 'mystical' anomoly of sensation we call 'The Mind'. Magic cannot treat such illness...and while my beleifs that 'Magic' and science are the same and that all things fail to defy the laws of physics, I will have trouble treating those that believe in some mystical, unexplainable, divine parenthesis regarding The Mind.
Thus far a few cases seem indicatory of pharmacological treatment...but where might I find a reliable, competant apothecary that is skilled in the production of psychotropics? And who out of these mystical-fanatics would submit to a regime of chemotherapy? None, I should think.
The Asylums of Silvermoon are long since closed, converted and subsequently destroyed as our people embrassed magical thinking and shyed away from logic. I have no where to admit some of these cases...some of which I simply cannot treat beyond any state of ad-hoc medicine without the environment and control provided in the old Asylums.
Perhaps I should build one? But with what? And with whom would I staff such a place. The average man is adept in basic First-Aid and healers are found in a plethoric state now that the common Hospital has been abolished or retro-fitted for casualties of war.
A lock-down facility would not be ideal...but a medium-security facility would be best. I have spent these last few nights in the Great Library, sifting through the old tomes and manuals...the epochs of literary history. Such places were once in make.
It is quite simple really...I cannot hope to successfully treat those suffering from complex delusions, chronic substance abuse and other heavy ailements on a simply out-patient basis.
But how often does one get what they want. For now I will make due...for now I must concentrate my efforts on less extraordinary needs...I need a competant pharmacist.