He was fine last time. Melody does not try to intervene. 

Forgiver knows what her job is (licking. her job is licking.)

Dree does say, "Leareth, do you need anything?"

Leareth takes several seconds to respond to that. 

:I - think I am all right? It would be nice if computers were somehow less frustrating but I am not really expecting that is a problem you can fix: 

"They're very frustrating," says Dree sympathetically. "I'm sure if someone had a way to make them not frustrating they'd be very rich, but here we are."

Someday Leareth will be better at doing things and can probably fix whatever logistical or infrastructure problems are upstream of computers being frustrating? ...Someday is not now. Trying to take actions aimed at fixing this problem sounds kind of terrifying. Leareth is trying not to think about this too hard. 

This continues to seem like a situation where her intervention won't help. 

:I'm curious what sorts of problems - physical or mental or anything else - your world doesn't have any good drugs or other treatments for?: 

Idrial, being a pharmacist, mostly knows about drugs that do exist and not ones that don't. Cancer is really hard to deal with?

:...Damn. Cancer is also pretty hard for Healers to deal with! I think there are a lot of kinds of cancer, but - my sense is that, for the most part, if the cancer has spread outside of its capsule, there's nothing a Healer can do that reliably works. If the tumor is localized then a Healer can try to burn it out without hurting the patient too much, but if it's already spread then basically all the Healer can do is try to boost the patient's own body's defenses: 

"Yeah, it's really a problem that cancer is made out of the same stuff as the rest of you and very few things will target only that and not other random stuff."

:….Huh. That’s a really good way of putting it! I mean, that sounds like a good description of what we’ve observed in Velgarth but I don’t think the Healers had been conceptualizing it that way? - Does your world have any scholarship on how cancers happen at all? I think our Healers don’t feel that they really understand it:  

They're getting out of his expertise but here is a blog he likes by a guy who interviews specialist medical people and writes up lay explanations of stuff. He has a sequence on cancer.

Melody mostly can’t read it yet but she’s grateful for the suggestion! 

:My sense so far is that Mindhealing - considering just the projective aspect, the sensory aspect is separate and maybe more useful - but active Mindhealing is maybe relatively better at helping people whose problems involves distorted or or unendorsed thoughts and feelings? Mindhealing can intervene quite precisely on that. But it’d be good to know if there are drugs here that help with those sorts of problems:

"It depends on the kind! Depression and anxiety and compulsive-family disorders and psychosis can all do that and respond to different stuff -" He can natter on about the different stuff.

Melody listens to his nattering. Nods along. 

:- What sorts of things fall under 'compulsive-family' disorders? I don't think we have a word for that category in Velgarth: 

"- oh, the classic presentations are things like cleaning themselves or their things obsessively, or caring a lot about things being symmetrical, or tics?"

:Are those in the same category? That's interesting. I mean, I can see it, I just wouldn't necessarily have thought to lump them together before:

"Well, maybe they aren't! We talk about them as a group but a lot of the groupings are very much made up."

:I suppose that's true, though psychosis and depression and anxiety feel like more natural clusters to me... I admit there seems to be a lot of overlap with depression and anxiety, a lot of my patients who have one problem will also have the other problem, but it still seems like they're differently-shaped problems even if they correlate: 

"Honestly almost all psychological problems are comorbid with all of the others."

:Which is interesting! I guess some physical problems are correlated too, someone with a bad heart is more likely to get very ill if they catch pneumonia, but, I mean, you can have health problems from being too fat or too thin and those are complete opposites: 

"It's sort of of a piece with there being a lethal dose of anything, even water."

Nod. 

:Anyway, so far my impression is that - since there's only one of me - I might be most helpful contributing to research, rather than just seeing patients. Do you know about any ongoing research about which drugs are effective? In particular, if there are drugs that seem to work for some patients and not others, but your world can't reliably distinguish why, I might be able to help since I can look at their minds directly and see what's going on: 

"There are a ton of drugs that work for some patients and not others. Or have bothersome side effects for some and not others but I imagine that would be less obvious to you - well, maybe some of them you could see - I wonder what brain zaps look like -"

:What are 'brain zaps'? They sound unpleasant!: 

"They are, I hear! I've never had them -" He can go read her an article about them.