Medical Doctor

MEDICAL STAFF

Medical Doctor

Access: Medbay, Morgue, Surgery
Additional Access: Chemistry Lab, Virology, Genetics Lab, Mineral Storage
Difficulty: Easy
Supervisors: Chief Medical Officer
Duties: Save lives, run around the ship looking for victims, scan everyone in sight
Guides: Guide to medicine, Guide to Surgery, Department Standard Operating Procedure
Quote: Oh, are you hurt? Here, let me kiss it better...

You are the Medical Doctor. You are at once essential and useless. With the advent of "perfect" cloning, saving lives is no longer as all important as it used to be. But don't despair! You can still help people! Mostly.

You spawn with a First-Aid Kit in Medbay where there are spares along with more specialized kits. There're also two syringe guns if you can get to one of them fast enough. Ammunition in the form of chemical medication can be found in the nearby vending machine pharmacy, but it's got nothing on what chemists can make.

Bare minimum requirements: If injured people will let you heal them instead of breaking into Medical Storage, do so.

NSVNRV

Doctor, Doctor!

When you are a Medical Doctor, your job is to heal people, save them from the brink of death, and dump those that do die into Genetics for cloning. You can diagnose injuries and diseases with the help of a health analyzer, conveniently located in all medical kits, or even your PDA, but then again so can everyone else. And they will. No one waits for the medic to help, or often even for a medic to open the doors. You may have to take drastic measures to get people to stop doing your job for you.

A quick overview of all the damage types is found below. If you want to conserve supplies or are feeling lazy, it's easier to bring the patient down the main hallway and put them in a sleeper pod, where you can use the attached console to inject them with ~~powerful~~ healing chemicals. This does not work, however, for bringing patients out of critical condition, nor can it fight toxin damage.

Fisticuffs, Knives, and everything in between

Whether it's from fists, bullets or a kitchen knife, it's classified as Brute Damage. Brute Damage is inevitably the most common form of damage.

Brute Damage takes the form of big red streaks, or blue-purple-red messes. Apply Bruise Packs in those areas (usually head and chest) or, in cases of a helpful Chemist and extreme damage, more advanced chemical patches.

Brute Damage can cause bleeding, which is covered in the guide to medicine more extensively.

To put it short, if it's bleeding, wrap it in gauze to give you breathing room to treat the damage. More often than not, a patient will be able to recover their own loss of blood over time (a healthy diet will speed this process up), but if they are reporting light-headedness or look pale, they will need a transfusion.

Fire is hot!

The second type of damage is Burn Damage. This is caused by fire and blisteringly high (or low) temperatures. If it's minor burns, apply A LITTLE ointment or force feed them an anti-burn pill, found in burn first-aid kits.

Burn Damage appears as grey streaks on a person's body, so apply the ointment in those locations (usually the chest area).

Poisons and You

Toxin Damage is the third kind of damage, and is often caused by rogue doctors. Plasma and radiation are other common sources.

Be it from poison, radiation, or simply too much dank, Toxin Damage has no visible form, so can only be recognised via analyzing or from the patient's vomiting. Inject with charcoal, or feed them anti-toxin pills, both found in toxin first-aid kits. Either way, they'll be right as meteor rain.

Suffocation, Asphyxiation, and general lack of air

The last kind of Damage often occurs when a patient is in critical health, and is usually accompanied by a another type of damage. Suffocation can be cured using salbutamol, CPR or plain fresh air. If the patient is in critical condition, then heal the other damage, and the suffocation should recover naturally.

Salbutamol and epinephrine, both found in oxygen first-aid kids, can slow suffocation damage when in Critical, but the patient can still die from progressing beatings, burns or toxins, and there is a risk of overdosing on epinephrine. Give as much salbutamol as you want, but remember to heal the other types of damage!

If the patient is suffocating with no other damage, a jab of epinephrine will bring suffocation damage down to 35, enough for the patient to regain conciousness. You may need to strip the patient's internals to prevent further suffocation, as the gas tank (or jetpack) may be failing to provide enough oxygen.

Medical Storage

The main reason you'll come in this room is to grab one of the health scanners on the table. These fashionable eyewear pieces let you see people's healthbars over their head. Not only is this useful for finding critical patients quickly in a crowd, but the red cross next to their healthbar will change to a sickly green face if they're infected with a virus, or a purple xenomorph if they're infected with an alien larva. Chemists, Geneticists and the Chaplain will sometimes want these, too.

Nurse suits and scrubs are contained here for your special snowflake needs, as are biosuits for when the virologist fucks up. There are also spare first-aid kits that every chucklefuck on the ship will attempt to loot, making your job even more obsolete. Do not let this happen.

Surgery

A room with an operating table, surgical tools that will be stolen 10 minutes into the round, and an observation chamber. You will occasionally come in here to debrain changeling victims, perform sex changes or repair eye damage caused by screwdriver-wielding assistants or flash-happy shitcurity. You can also forcibly sedate someone, cut out their appendix and beat them with it as they wake up groggy with a mixture of confusion and numb, ambiguous horror and revulsion. In practice, it's mostly unused.

A guide to surgery is here.

Modern Miracles

A Deep Freeze

Setting up Cryogenics is easy and simple. Idiot-proof, even, but many forget to do it until it's too late.

Firstly, fill the tubes with Cryoxadone - beakers should be on the table. Next, turn on the freezer and set the temperature as low as possible.

Before placing someone in cryo, connect one of the O2 canisters (next to the freezer) to it's port; there's a wrench nearby to do this. Be sure to disconnect the canister once the patient is healed, otherwise you'll waste the O2 inside (having someone die in the tube because the canisters are empty is never fun). Also, be sure to remove any insulated bodywear such as RIG suits, fire suits and bomb suits. People that have received cold resistance superpowers from the Geneticist can't be chilled in cryo and will have to be treated with alternative methods.

Cryo is awfully slow these days, so you might want to just inject some cryoxadone into your patient and put them in a cold shower. Medbay has a shower in virology's access room, and you can wrench the shower to make it pour out freezing water.

The Mad Rush

If the Patient is in critical condition, especially when the health is negative, you have to work fast. Apply some epinephrine to stabilize the patient, place medical gauze on any bleeding wounds, and take them to medbay+. If Cryo isn't set up, throw them in a sleeper, fill them with rejuvenators, and set up Cryo. Once cryo is set up, strip the patient inside the Cryo room (to prevent people from nabbing their stuff), stuff them in a cryo cell and switch on the cryo. Click on the tube to analyze their health, and make sure their health is improving; if it's not, check that their body temperature is actually low, they're not wearing a hardsuit or anything else that blocks temperature,, the freezer is on and that the connected O2 canister still has pressure. If they are still in critical condition, leave them to cool off a bit longer. If not, heal them normally, accept their kudos (or sarcastically do so if they offer none) and then send them on their way.'

Clear!

If a patient has died recently, you may be able to use the defibrillator to revive them on the spot. The defibrillator can be found in Medical Doctor lockers (plus a more portable version in the CMO's locker), and is usually used by up-and-coming paramedics.

To use a normal bulky defibrillator, take off your backpack or satchel, put the defib on your back and click it, get your other hand free and activate the paddles to wield them in both hands, then click on the patient while targeting their chest. If the patient is wearing a thick suit like a space suit or firesuit you need to strip it off as well.

In order to successfully resuscitate a patient, several criteria must be met:

The patient must not be dead for more than two minutes.
The patient must not have over 180 brute or burn damage; 179 brute and 179 burn is fine, just not 180 of one type.
The patient must not be a suicide.
The patient must not be catatonic.
The patient must be in their body (they will get a message when they begin being defibrillated).

If all these factors are met, then the patient will come back to life! However, this doesn't mean they can just get right back up. Instead, they'll likely still be deep in critical condition, as a successful revival only removes a bit of each damage type. They must quickly receive medical attention if you want to keep them alive. Make sure to use a health analyzer or your PDA to check how they died; if they have toxins in their body, they most likely still do (chemicals remain in bodies after death, but do not metabolize).

Alternatively, you can disable the safeties on defibrillators in two ways: emagging it or having it be hit by any form of EMP (you can re-enable safety by doing the same thing again). The emag does it silently, but the EMP makes the defibrillator emit a warning sound. When the safeties are off, help intent functions normally, but harm intent will instantly stun the victim for the duration of a stun baton as well as doing a large amount of stamina damage.

Medibots - Replace you, will they?

Medibots are the bane of any Doctor - their very existence is to replace you!

Not to worry! You can simply do your job by managing the Medibot. Using your ID, you can alter his settings, and fill him with a beaker of delicious Omnizine or Mannitol, and let him inject away!

Concurrently, you can fill him with a beaker of unstable mutagen, or even Emag him. Once Emagged, the delightful little medibot buzzes around injecting everyone and everything with not-so-helpful chemicals - like Beepsky without the I AM THE LAW.

No Respect

Nobody respects most of Medbay or the MDs. You'll run into this in many shades - an assistant that doesn't know when to stop pissing you off, shitcurity coming in to stun or flashbang at random, a traitor that wants Chemistry access, or an engineer who needs geneticist superpowers for ~~space exploration~~ building his autism fortress while his butt-buddy chain-recalls the shuttle for over half an hour because "WE CAN FIX THIS LAGGY SHITFEST GUYS COME ON."

You will, inevitably, have invaders. If you give the slightest damn about doing your job, you're going to have to beat into these invader's heads that you intend to do it. Otherwise, they intend to ignore your existence and do your job for you. Your best defense, here, is your coworkers - with up to 5 Medical Doctors, the CMO, Virologist, two Chemists, two Geneticists and countless patients, Medbay is packed, and all of them feel the same sting of disregard cast at them by fellow crewmates. If you band together, you will usually far outnumber any lone threat that wants to break down every window and grille in your workplace.

If your invader doesn't listen, remember that you are a holy warrior in one of the most unholy places on the ship. While most of the chemicals you have access to don't do jack (and if you're running around with a syringe gun, it's better in the hands of chemists) you still have a strait jacket, some handy-dandy morphine that acts like horse-tranquilizers in the sleepers (don't overdose!), and I hear the surgery room goes woefully unused nowadays...

If you prefer to passively resist the greytide, consider moving the medbay's soap and space cleaners into the medbay storage so that assistants can't simply run in and grab them from the public medbay area. Most trespassers who drag in a patient and stay to treat them on their own are probably just concerned about their colleague, so help them out if that's the case, and they'll be out of your medbay in no time!

Tips

If you implant a guy with a flashlight, he can still use it as a flashlight, and even toggle it.
Bruise packs and ointments are not 5-use items, but 5-item stacks of 1-use items. Never give science a full stack of packs again.
Raw carrots heal eye damage.
You can use a health analyzer on a body to see the time of death.
Starkist is just cola with orange juice. Thus will metabolize a bit faster and can be used as a very poor man's medicine to speed up CPR.
Cryo won't work on you if you have cold resistance:
- Insulating items like hardsuits, ins. gloves, gasmask, firesuits - they all slow down cryo or even stop it from working entirely.
- If the patient in question has cold resistance, you may want to try go old-school and actually apply some medicine yourself, lazy bum.
- That is, of course, if there's only cryoxadone in the tubes, since those need cold body temperatures to work.
Wearing earmuffs will heal ear damage.
Wearing a blindfold will heal eye damage.
You can clone people that have been turned into an alien, by extracting the alien's brain and shoving it into a human body.
Attach a stethoscope to your uniform and it'll make you look like you know what you're doing.
You can drag&drop people onto the cryo tubes or the sleepers. This will also close the tube/sleeper right away.
R&D almost always has some downtime between finishing mech research and getting Mining delivery. Bitch at them to upgrade the cloner, clone scanner and sleepers.
A fully upgraded cloner negates clone damage and retardation. It can also clone suicides and husks.
The sleepers in medbay will show any reagent in the patient’s body, not just the chemicals you can inject them with.
Charcoal will not only heal poison damage, it will also actively remove all other reagents (including poison) from the body.
Showers (wrenched to be cold) work just as well as cryo, as long as you have the drugs in your system.

Tips for Traitoring

The stethoscope can be used to break into the safe. There's not much of value there, though.
You can replace the cryos with acid, so instead of healing people will melt to death.
Syringe guns are one of the most underrated and lethal weapons on the ship. A simple 15 unit lexorin or plasma syringe will kill unless the victim receives medical care. If you have more time, you can also create interesting poison mixes that crit in less than 10 seconds, or add something that stuns to the mix. Anyone with a thick suit will block syringes though.
You know those useless linen boxes in medbay and elsewhere? You can hide items in there.

Hello, I'm Dr. Death

So, you are a traitor? DON'T HIT SUICIDE JUST YET! There is so many wondrous, terrible things you can do. When people are injured, they are taken to medbay to be "doctored" by you and other people. You can then shoot them up with poisons, take them some place private in medbay and take what you want, or go for malpractice to end them. This is very good if you happen to be in a crowded area and stab the HoP and drag them back to Medical when people are in a panic. You can hide victims by putting little notes by morgue trays saying "This man has been borged" or "This man has been cloned" and no one will bat an eye at why they are naked, and why they are there (and often the chaplain will cremate them, or the chef will take some meat).

To Conclude

You are a Doctor. Your job is to help people - sometimes forcibly - and dealing with the fallout from the numerous violent calamities that inevitably descend on the ship. You serve both as go-between for the ship and large and the more specialized medical departments.

If you seek respect in this job, you have to go out of your way to earn it. But never forget the damage you can inflict on the unwary.

Jobs on FTL13
	Command	Captain, Executive Officer, Bridge Officer
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	Supply	Quartermaster, Cargo Technician, Shaft Miner, Munitions Officer
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	Medical	Chief Medical Officer, Medical Doctor, Chemist, Geneticist, Virologist
	Service	Janitor, Bartender, Cook, Botanist, Clown, Mime
	Civilian	Assistant, Lawyer, Chaplain, Librarian
	Non-human	AI, Cyborg, Positronic Brain, Drone, Personal AI, Construct, Adamantine Golem, Ghost
	Antagonists	Traitor, Changeling, Nuclear Operative, Wizard, Shadowling, Abductor, Xenomorph, Revenant, Space Ninja, Holoparasite, Swarmers, Blob, Devil, Clockwork Cult
	Special	Centcom Official, Death Squad Officer, Emergency Response Officer, Ian
	Races	Humans, Lizardperson, Flyperson, Plasmaman, Podman, Miscellaneous