#+ also the type that’s willing to look into more experimental and potentially unethical treatments if it’s going to help someone more

[bokatan]

SNAPDRAGON!!!! (sorry i love snapdragons i got really excited about it lmao)

[ botanical headcanons ]

snapdragon: is your muse merciful? why or why not?

This is where Mercy's name choice is a bit ironic- she can be very compassionate and merciful at times when she feels it's warranted, but on the other hand she can be downright nasty when she doesn't think it's deserved. This is mainly something that comes into play with faction conflicts & bounty hunting- she'll take matters into her own hands if she feels like there isn't going to be an appropriate punishment for what was done. For example- she’d likely “lose” a bounty placed on someone for killing their spouse if she found out that spouse was abusive(and she’d likely be missing supplies, caps, etc). On the other hand, she’d turn in a bounty very dead if it was for someone with some sort of wealth or authority if she learned that they were responsible for harming or killing children. She doesn’t trust the NCR or any other government/legal organizations to actually hold people accountable when they’ve committed heinous acts, & especially if they have some sort of power or authority or if they’d have the ability to pay their way out.

Reed's somewhere in the middle but leaning more towards merciful. He's fine with emotionally removing himself from situations and following out orders he disagrees with, but he's also not inherently cruel and doesn't actually want to harm others. He’s the type that’ll usually go out of his way to either try and help or kill a severely injured animal or person, and he’s pretty careful with his aim to make sure whatever he’s aiming for has a very quick death rather than just injuring them.

[condensed-theorem-shop]

Federation Worldbuilding: Medical

(Worldbuilding for my dystopian Star Trek AU, Federation.)

In Federation, medical science has progressed in leaps and bounds since the twenty-first century; by 2166, they have made a number of significant medical breakthroughs.

(Cut for length.)

Communicable Disease

The vast majority of communicable diseases have been eradicated. Some serious diseases still survive, but they're rare, and can almost universally be cured once diagnosed.

The single world government and improved transportation technology make vaccination campaigns much easier; hyposprays can be re-used safely (unlike needles), don't require training to administer, and stand up to transportation much better than the vaccines we know.

For the most part, diseases which remain widespread do so because they're so mild that people don't bother getting vaccinated or treated or even staying home from work while sick with them; people still get colds, but malaria is long gone.

New diseases crop up occasionally, but cures and vaccines are usually developed promptly. It's not unusual for visitors to a new planet to accidentally bring back some disease, despite measures against this, and such epidemics can be serious, since the human population doesn't have any established resistance; but they're almost always contained promptly.

Dermal Regenerators

Dermal regenerators are small handheld devices that can be used to cause rapid skin growth, healing minor cuts and scrapes in seconds. They have a range of intensities, from a low setting appropriate for cat scratches/minor burns from cooking, to a high setting used for burn victims in hospitals.

Regenerators built only to function at the low end of the range are a common component of home first aid kits. Regenerators which can treat more serious injuries, however, are only supposed to be used by trained medical professionals, because of potential health risks. A regenerator used for too long or at too high a setting for the injury in question can cause painful blistering; used much too long or at much too high a setting, they can cause cancer (which, while treatable in Federation, is still not pleasant to have.) Doctors are trained to assess what setting is called for, use the regenerator as little as possible while still achieving the desired effect, and reduce the risk of side effects when extensive treatment is needed by spacing it out over multiple days or regenerating the skin partway and then allowing it to finish healing naturally.

A rare genetic condition can cause extreme sensitivity to dermal regenerators, such that any use at all raises large painful blisters, and even small amounts of use at low settings can cause cancer. (This is colloquially referred to as an "allergy" to dermal regenerators, even though medically speaking it's no such thing.) This isn't usually a serious issue for the sufferers; they just have to make sure it's in their medical file, and heal from injuries the old-fashioned way.

Sunbeds

Sunbeds look roughly like high-tech tanning beds with none of the cancer risk. They use  a combination of light and fancy 22nd-century technology to manually adjust the user's circadian rhythm; as such, they're the technology of choice for travelers wanting to avoid jet lag. Five or six hours in a sunbed will set your sleep cycle to match whatever time zone you're in (or some other time zone, if you want to do that for some reason).

Sunbeds are universally present on spaceships, because of the need for multiple (alpha/beta/gamma) shifts covering the entire day/night cycle of the ship; crewmembers transferred between shifts can visit Medical and spend a night in a sunbed, rather than trying to suffer through an eight-hour adjustment in their sleep cycle the old-fashioned way.

Transplants

Replicators should in theory be capable of producing human organs for transplant; in practice, however, regulations and social pressures associated with the taboo on genetic engineering also interfere severely with the research needed to program them appropriately. As a result, they're currently limited to producing blood (which can of course be of any blood type as needed); and only human blood, Vulcan blood not having yet been figured out sufficiently.

Prosthetics

The prosthetics in Federation aren't much more advanced than the best ones available in our world; Geordi's visor is still two hundred years away. Artificial limbs can respond to the user's muscle signals, and send sensory feedback in return, but still clumsily and unreliably. The big difference is that, with replicators, everyone who needs a prosthetic can have the best available -- can in fact have a different one for every day of the week, if they like different kinds for different purposes, or even just for aesthetics.

Tricorders

Everyone is probably familiar with these from canon. They're little devices that you can use to scan someone or something and get information on its condition. Different models are optimized for different purposes: you get tricorders that are best at analyzing the composition of rocks, or of the atmosphere, or general-purpose tricorders that will do a decent job of analyzing whatever you run into on a new planet, or of course medical tricorders which are best at scanning someone and figuring out what's wrong with them.

Tricorders are limited in their use, but very good within their range of competence. They're excellent at diagnosing problems like "dehydration" or "iodine deficiency" or "mercury poisoning" or even "some kind of flu-like virus." They're much less good at precise identification of diseases -- they'd have to have seen the exact same one before -- or figuring out the root cause of multiple symptoms when this is more complicated than a database look-up, or so forth. And they're prone to very silly errors, especially when used in ways they're not designed for; if you use a tricorder on someone with nonstandard biology, it will diagnose them with all sorts of absurd things.

Non-communicable diseases

Lots of non-communicable diseases are also treatable! Diabetes, kidney failure, cancer, and so on and so forth. Genetic conditions are generally not, because of the taboo on research in that area; there's often but not always decent palliative care available.

Old age, broadly, has not been solved, but people do live longer due to the improved medical technology; it's ordinary for a human to make 100, and 120 isn't unheard of.

Genetic engineering

Super super super illegal. Crime against humanity. Incredibly taboo.

This, of course, doesn't stop people from doing it.

The research on how to genetically engineer improvements along almost all axes has existed for some time; it's heavily censored, of course, and illegal to research, but people still get ahold of it one way or another. If you know what you're doing, and have the right price to offer, you can find someone to genetically engineer you a designer baby.

Of course, the kind of people who are willing to do that are often very sketchy indeed. Some of them are just philanthropic doctors who have principled disagreements with the Federation. But you're just as likely to get someone who's actually doing their own incredibly unethical human experimentation, and promises to engineer you a smart baby but actually produces one with two heads, or who charges you an outrageous fee and then doesn't actually do anything at all. And that's if you don't just get someone incompetent, or a government plant who'll handcuff you on the spot.

People seek out genetic engineering for a wide range of reasons. Sometimes they just want to make sure their child doesn't inherit some condition. Sometimes they want to have a biological child with their same-sex partner. (Human-Vulcan hybrid children aren't yet possible, but they will be eventually.) Sometimes they want a designer baby: smarter, prettier, stronger, healthier. Sometimes they want a clone, of themselves or of someone else, which falls under the relevant legal umbrella. Sometimes they don't want a child at all, they want a supersoldier or a superspy or some other custom-built tool.

Other reasons people can count as genetically engineered: gene therapy exists, though it's risky and unpleasant and just as illegal as any other kind of genetic engineering; someone who's had gene therapy is legally considered genetically engineered. The child of two genetically engineered people is legally considered genetically engineered. (Someone who has only one genetically engineered parent, or less heritage than that, is in a dubious legal situation which hasn't yet been settled to anyone's satisfaction.)

It's not just illegal to genetically engineer people, it's illegal for genetically engineered people to exist; there's plenty of legal precedent for this to cash out to a death sentence, although someone sufficiently sympathetic/with a sufficiently good lawyer/who makes a plea deal/who sells other people out may well be able to bargain that down to life imprisonment. Genetically engineered people aren't considered to have any legal rights, although the Federation would probably still get complaints if it actually flat-out tortured them.

There's case law establishing that genetically engineered people are legally the property of whoever did the genetic engineering. This is based on a fairly stretched interpretation of intellectual property law, and was essentially just courts coming up with an excuse to hold people responsible for the actions of their genetically engineered supersoldiers during the Eugenics Wars. It's basically never actually used in the obvious horrible way, because in order for someone to claim those legal rights over someone they genetically engineered, they'd have to confess to genetic engineering, which would be unutterably stupid.

The legal penalty for genetic engineering isn't death -- the Federation doesn't do the death penalty, genetically engineered people just get shuffled in under the cover of "they're not allowed to exist in the first place, we're just fixing that" -- but it's subject to whatever are the most stringent legal penalties that are available; certainly life imprisonment without parole, possibly other things if they come up with anything (e.g. dumping them on a half-terraformed asteroid somewhere). And this can also apply to people who assist with it, or help cover it up, or harbor people they know to be genetically engineered, or otherwise make themselves accomplices.

In addition to all the legal strictures, genetic engineering (or anything associated with it in the general consciousness) is incredibly socially taboo. ("Eugenics" is a decent proxy, when comparing to our world, though it doesn't have the same stigma attached to the people who are the result of it.) Prisoners charged with anything associated with genetic engineering are routinely abused and maltreated by the guards and other prisoners; suggesting that someone is genetically engineered is fighting words; suspicion of being genetically engineered gets you ostracized at minimum, likely refused basic services and/or beat up in the streets. This is not a popular cause; bringing it up socially doesn't get you "ooo, cool and edgy," it gets horrified silence and being invited to leave.