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'''MEDTECH''' — You're Gonna Feel A Pinch

= Medtech = In the current era medical care is managed not as a public good but as just another service that you have to shell out t..."

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<div style="line-height:normal; background:#000000; padding:6px; text-align:center;">'''MEDTECH''' — You're Gonna Feel A Pinch</div>
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= Medtech =

In the current era medical care is managed not as a public good but as just another service that you have to shell out the Eddies for, which means a Medtech is only as good as they can afford to be: from a back alley Ripperdoc selling second-hand chrome with bugs and dents, to a corpo doctor working in one of the big city medcenters, and everything in between. For the edgerunner community a good Medtech is a necessity to have around, to pull out bullets, heal nanite burns, or install that sick new chrome you found. But most of all, it's kind of nice to have at least one person in the group who cares about people getting out alive and in one piece. It's kind of hard to get into this job without a measure of compassion for your fellow person, and that's a currency most veteran edgerunners have in short supply.

== History ==

Before the War, being a doctor meant med school, a license, and a hospital with your name on the staff roster somewhere. That world didn't survive the Fourth Corporate War any better than anything else did. Military hospitals sprang up wherever the fighting was worst, and the doctors who worked them needed hands, any hands, to hold down screaming patients and splice cyberware back into people who'd rather have kept their original limbs. A whole generation of Medtechs learned their trade that way, fast and bloody, with no time for a diploma.

When the War ended, most of the old hospital system didn't come back. What replaced it was a patchwork: An actual Medical school, a handful of real hospitals still charging real money for real care, a thin layer of licensed paramedical services fighting to stay solvent, and underneath all of it, the Ripperdocs, back-alley Medtechs who never had a medical license to lose in the first place and never asked what happened to the guy bleeding out on the table. Some learned from an old Bladerunner-obsessed mentor. Some learned from a Pack healer like Virgil "Redtail" Martinez. A few learned from a life in the corporate military. All of them learned the same lesson: out here, whoever can fix you is the only doctor that matters.

Trauma Team is the exception that makes the rule visible. Born out of the same wartime chaos, they turned emergency medicine into the most successful subscription service in Night City, arriving in armored AV-4s with a Cryopump and a surgeon in the back, provided you're paid up. Everyone else, Ripperdocs, Nomad Pack healers, corporate in-house staff, exists somewhere on the spectrum between Trauma Team's mil-spec professionalism and the reality that most people in this city can't afford it.

== The Medbag ==

A Medtech's kit is their whole world in a box, and what's inside says everything about who they work for. A street Ripperdoc's bag is scavenged and improvised: a beat-up airhypo, sterilizing wipes bought from a bodega with no brand marks, whatever surgical tools didn't get pawned last month, and a lot of confidence covering for a lack of proper equipment. A corporate or Trauma Team kit is the opposite end of the spectrum entirely, climate-sealed, diagnostic-linked, stocked with airhypos already loaded with Rapidetox and Speedheal, and backed up by a Cryopump ready to buy a patient another week of not being dead. A Medtech's medbag is also as unique as each Medtech is: some use the old-fashioned doctor's bag that opens on top (ooh, classy), others use a series of pouches and bags strapped to their body (fairly standard for Trauma Team), and others go with a backpack for more open space.

The Cryopump itself deserves its own mention: a briefcase-sized unit built around a collapsible bodybag and a chemical pump, capable of dropping an unconscious or willing patient into stasis cold enough to stop the countdown on Death Saves entirely, for up to a week if the bag holds. It's not a cure. It's a pause button, and every experienced Medtech has a story about a patient they bought just enough time for with one. Cryopumps come in a few shapes and models. Bigger Trauma Team models let the client lie down straight on a normal-sized gurney to avoid being moved around, while most edgerunners prefer smaller, more durable models that curl the subject up into the fetal position for easy storage.

Plenty of Medtechs supplement their kit through their own chrome: a Cyberarm fitted with a Tool Hand or a Techscanner turns the Medtech themselves into the toolkit, no fumbling for equipment when a patient's dying under their hands. It costs a fortune and it never gets left behind at a scene, which for a lot of Medtechs is the whole point. The downside to this is the belief(not an entirely incorrect belief if some clinic studies are to be believed) that extensive cyberware especially in the hands can cause a lack of surgical precision.

== Cyberpsychosis Therapy ==

This is where a Medtech's job stops looking like surgery and starts looking like something closer to a counselor. Therapy, real Therapy, isn't a pill or a patch job. It's a week spent locked in a room with someone, walking them back from wherever the chrome and the trauma and the life they've been living took them, using every tool from straight talk to pharmaceutical-assisted brain reprogramming Biotechnica perfected during the War. It rarely undoes the damage entirely. What it buys is time, and a person who still recognizes the face in the mirror.

Most Medtechs who take this work seriously will tell you the old warnings about cyberpsychosis, too much chrome drives you crazy, don't get greedy with the ripperdoc, are half right at best. I mean, that's one of the reasons why Edgerunners are called that. Plenty of people are carrying more metal than they have meat left and never come close to the edge. Others go over after one bad implant, one bad boss who made them get it, one bad week they never talked to anyone about. What actually tips a person is a harder question than the screamsheets want it to be, and a good Medtech spends more time asking it than most people ever bother to.

Whoever loses that fight entirely doesn't stay a patient for long. Night City has a dedicated unit for people who go all the way over, and Psycho Squad doesn't get called in to offer Therapy.

== Different Types of Doctor ==

Not every Medtech does the same job, and the differences between them say as much about Night City as anything else on this page.

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Ripperdocs</span>''' — The backbone of street medicine and the most common face of the trade. Ripperdocs install chrome, patch wounds, and ask fewer questions the further down the market you go. What a Ripperdoc's practice actually looks like ranges from a clean licensed clinic with a reputation worth protecting to a folding table in the back of a Watson garage. Either way, they're the ones most Night City residents actually see.

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Normal Doctors</span>''' — The ones who still went the traditional route: medical school, licensing, a hospital badge with their name on it. Rarer than they used to be, and increasingly concentrated wherever the money is: corporate medcenters, licensed clinics, the parts of the city that can still afford a doctor in the old sense of the word. Interestingly house calls have become a thing again making some doctors a luxury service.

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Trauma Team Medics</span>''' — Mil-spec professionals riding an armored AV-4, trained to hit the ground fighting and stabilize a patient in the middle of a firefight if that's what the job requires. The most reliably competent Medtechs in the city, provided the client's subscription is current. The better your Trauma Team subscription the better trained your medtech will be. From the silver package giving you a trained emergency medic/combat nurse. All the way up to Platinum rank giving you an on site emergency doctor with an actual diploma and everything.

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Nomad Clan Healers</span>''' — Family doctor, surgeon, and pharmacist rolled into one person, learned on the road rather than in a classroom, and trusted with an entire Pack's survival because there usually isn't anyone else to trust with it. Clan healers are typically one of the leading members of a nomad clan and will usually get any resources they demand from the clan no questions asked.

== Pharmaceuticals ==

A Medtech who leans into pharmaceuticals is the reason a crew doesn't have to make a pharmacy run between jobs. The trade covers a handful of staple compounds, each one built for a specific kind of trouble:

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Antibiotics</span>''' — The unglamorous baseline of the trade. Keeps infection from turning a survivable wound into a fatal one, especially for anyone patched up under less than sterile conditions. Highly useful in edgerunner teams due to the suspiciously high amounts of STD's and/or bar fight injuries.

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Rapidetox</span>''' — Flushes toxins and poisons out of a patient's system fast. The drug of choice for a bad overdose, a poisoning, or anyone who needs to sober up and function right now. Considered highly amusing by most edgerunner teams as the cheaper ones cause projectile vomiting or explosive diarrhea when clearing out drugs and booze.

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Speedheal</span>''' — Kicks a patient's own healing into overdrive. Doesn't fix what's broken on its own, but it buys a wounded operator time they wouldn't otherwise have. Considered highly uncomfortable for use due to the drug causing the body to rapidly overheat while healing. Most netrunners call people who complain about this 'pussies'.

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Immunoblockers</span>''' — Formally baloperidol, informally just "blockers." A cocktail of anti-psychotics and immune-suppressing compounds that keeps the edge off for anyone flirting with [[Cyberware#Cyberpsychosis|Cyberpsychosis]], most commonly the heavily chromed operators the street calls Chromejockeys. Comes in a variety of dosages and strengths, Chrome Jockeys have been known to get addicted to the sense of calm it can instill in the short term.

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Sedatives and Painkillers</span>''' — Field-grade pain management, for keeping a patient stable and functional through a procedure or a long ride to somewhere safer. Almost always kept under lock and key by medtechs due to the amount of people who abuse these drugs.

None of this comes cheap, and a really good Medtech will even make their own drugs in their own clinics. If that is a good thing or not depends entirely on you.

== Famous Medtechs ==

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Carrie Lachanan & Bob Jones</span>''' are the two Faces of Trauma Team, married doctors who built the company's day-to-day operations and its supply chain respectively, and who by all accounts would rather be treating patients than sitting through a single Corporate hearing.

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Virgil "Redtail" Martinez</span>''' — A famous Nomad healer in the Badlands. Never went to med school and doesn't have letters after his name, but he's kept an entire Nomad Pack alive for years on nothing but hard-won field skill, the same hands that once splinted a hawk's wing as a kid now setting bones and closing wounds out on the Badlands.

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Doc Mittens</span>''' runs with Danger Gal as their Trauma Team-trained Medtech, proof that even a subscription service produces the occasional legend once you put them in the field long enough.

* '''<span style="color:#ffd700;">Stick and Twist</span>''' are Trauma Team siblings who survived a building collapse together and came out the other side with a fierce, family-first loyalty to the job and to each other, the kind of story that makes people trust the company a little more than they probably should.

== See Also ==

* [[Cheat Sheet]] — full healing rules, Stabilization DVs, and Wound State reference.
* [[Megacorporations]] — Trauma Team's corporate profile and subscription tiers.
* [[Cyberware#Cyberpsychosis|Cyberpsychosis]] — the full clinical and street picture of what Therapy is actually treating.

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''"First rule of the trade: you can't save everybody. Second rule: never tell the client that until after they've paid."''

Medtech - Revision history

Mnemnosyne: Created page with " 440px '''MEDTECH''' — You're Gonna Feel A Pinch = Medtech = In the current era medical care is managed not as a public good but as just another service that you have to shell out t..."

Mnemnosyne: Created page with "

440px

'''MEDTECH''' — You're Gonna Feel A Pinch

= Medtech = In the current era medical care is managed not as a public good but as just another service that you have to shell out t..."