Should cauterization exist?

[quote=“Jakers, post:19, topic:8022”]In my opinion, cauterization really should exist. Sure it isn’t really that realistic, but in terms of gameplay terms it saves your character from dying to the fact they can’t find any first aid kits or disinfectant.

It’s a rare chance to disinfectant a wound, and very punishing. If we’re going for realism, it probably shouldn’t be a thing, but it’s in there just to make gameplay balanced for people who got an unlucky infection, preventing their super awesome character who happens to not have a first aid kit from becoming a Z.[/quote]

If you find a teleporter befor you die you can teleport which removes the blob from you and then die from the infection not turning into a z.

So you can rest in piece. (Y)

[quote=“StopSignal, post:20, topic:8022”]Maybe an infection is too that got in the wound, and cauterizing makes it get destroyed if heated up to almost burning?

[me=StopSignal]raises shield for all the corrections he will get[/me][/quote]

an infection is an infection by whatever… your already infected by the blob so it makes no sense that a bit more by a bite wound would do anything more then perhaps activate the blob from stasis making you mutate-

[me=StopSignal]blocked a bit of damage with his shield[/me]

And also that sounds good? Still quite weird though

gimme that shield its cool.

Human bites heal badly due to large amount of bacteria in human saliva. Apparently they get infected more often than dog bites (but less than cat bites). Add some rot-related bacteria to that and its potentially deadly even without any zombie AIDSbola.

Human bites heal badly due to large amount of bacteria in human saliva. Apparently they get infected more often than dog bites (but less than cat bites). Add some rot-related bacteria to that and its potentially deadly even without any zombie AIDSbola.[/quote]

Yeah pretty much that but people seem to think that cata z carry some sort of zombifying agent. (they do but its not what causes the infected bite wound)
er i hope i made sense.

Nice explanation .

I’d like to see cautery remain as a last-ditch method for closing bleeding wounds, with possible risk for infection as a side-effect of the method. If we could amputate our own limbs (cab we??), I would assume that would cause bleeding, which would again require bandaging or cautery.

Using cautery to heal infections always struck me as an unrealistic method, though the price of pain to pay made it work well in a gaming sense.

A couple of years ago, I had an abscess on my perineum. It grew to the size of my fist and I ended up in the emergency room getting it lanced. They sent me home without antibiotics and by the next morning my balls were the size of grapefruits. By the time I reached the hospital, my whole midsection was lobster red with infection. I spent the next week in hospital getting an ocean of antibiotics pumped into me to save my life. I had come within hours of Fournier’s Gangrene, an infection of so-called “flesh-eating bacteria.” (If you want to terrify yourself, go ahead and do a Google image search on that.)

The only treatment for Fournier’s Gangrene is what they call “radical debridement.” That is, they need to cut ahead of the infection, through the healthy tissue. This is not always effective (it has only a 30% survival rate), and it is always disfiguring… but it works. Sometimes. I think cauterization works on the same principle. Incinerate the tissue ahead of the infection. It would be immensely painful and probably crippling, but I think it’s medically viable if the only alternative is death.

The problem with cautery is that it necrotizes tissue, but does not debride it. Dead tissue sitting atop healthy tissue has a tendency of being a really great site for bacteria. I see where your argument is going, and there is the chance cautery could still be of use, but I would more closely compare radical debridement to amputation than cautery. It might largely depend on what the bacteria considers favourable at that point.

Sorry about what you’ve been through. The only cautery I’ve had done was cold cautery for plantar’s warts. Meaning my infection is viral, rather than bacterial. Cauterizing warts has a terribly low chance of success too. It mostly worked for me because I damaged so much surrounding tissue my body’s immune system went into overdrive and fought off the mess I’d inflicted along with the knot of wart. I will always have the virus, unfortunately. It’s already in me. It just shows up in weak spots. I’ve stopped treating the last wart I have because in damaging healthy tissue to get rid of it, I actually create more entry points for new warts to form. It’s frustrating.

Wow pthalocy that sounds discouraging xD

And upon death you will become a monster wart … excuse me~

There’s a lot of varieties of the human papillomavirus. Mine happens to be benign, but incredibly stubborn. Frankly, CarlStayBack! had it far worse than I. Freezing doesn’t hurt much or require antibiotics.

Send your lil white soldiers to do a genocide on those virus insurgence. the empire of pthaloicania shall not be messed with.

I see the arguments here : cauterizing might help but one would need to remove the dead tissue and clean the wound afterwards in order to avoid having a subsequent infection.

There are giant flies in the game, and maggots have been used for centuries on the battlefield to clean necrotic wounds. Maybe cauterization would simply buy you some more time to find antibiotics or apply some maggots (obtained from giant fly corpses). Or we could simply assume that ordinary flies can do the job over time.

“You cauterize the wound and allow flies to lay eggs in the dead, burnt tissue.” Then over the next couple of days you’d go through maddening periods of itching as the maggots clean the wound for you. If you really want to make sure cauterization is a last-ditch thing, give it a chance to cause either permanent damage to stats or permanent traits like ugly, deformed, etc. Actually, with the masochist trait – or a willingness to simply endure the pain and risk the stat drops – you could scar yourself to “terrifying” by repeatedly cauterizing yourself.

The blob works wonders on your wounds so you ll not stay disfigured for long… it ll heal.
Same as it makes you mutate it creates new tissue like it does when it suplemets your natural healing.

[quote=“Valpo, post:33, topic:8022”]The blob works wonders on your wounds so you ll not stay disfigured for long… it ll heal.
Same as it makes you mutate it creates new tissue like it does when it suplemets your natural healing.[/quote]

Only if it has to, to keep it’s vehicle (you) alive. Frankly, given the amount of dying I do, it seems to take more than the threat of a few scars to encourage the goo to go into healing overdrive. It doesn’t seem to respond to regular infections, for that matter, so it’s not a catch-all replacement immune system either.

As i understand it the goo doesn t do what it has to. its presense is healing you. reason can be discussed… i simply asume its mutagenic properties promote regeneration .

i didn t claim it to be a replacement imune system. i would say its the contrary as can be seen by decreasing health when the blob gets more active /mutates you.

So it heals you always. Does it want that ? I do not know maybe. Or it just can t help it.

edit: actually seeing as how the blob trys to kill you when you encounter it in its raw form i realy doubt that its willingly benefitial (or perhaps its not one blob but several competing entities)

I tend to think of the blob as similar to the ‘infection’ from Penumbra: Black Plague.

In it’s ‘natural’ state it is perfectly unified hive mind. The usual method of infection renders hosts into reshaped tools of that hiveming. In the PC an unusual thing occurs, he survives the initial attempts to render him one with their mind and the portion of the organism caught in him not only has a metaphysical breakdown to appreciate the concept of ‘I’ but eventually resists threats to both purge it from the host PC and attempts by the hivemind to re-integrate itself.

Anyhow, cleansing a wound with fire where we have access to so many better alternatives is fairly insane, but facing down an apocalyptic horde of the hungry dead while nurturing the seed of your own alien necroapotheosis within your own blood probably puts things in a different perspective.

I like your aproach belteshazzar.

I mean we don t know much about it so why not :stuck_out_tongue:

Its not the willingness of the survivor to do it thats the problem, its the effectiveness. IRL it makes things worse. There surely are better alternatives. I dont know if the ones already mentioned in this thread are, but surely someone who knows more about medicine can tell that.

I don’t know… wouldn’t pouring it in high percent alcohol worked like disinfectant?

I suppose interesting blob discussion belongs elsewhere anyway heh. My mistake for any assumptions I made regarding discussions on the subject.

I still stand by my previous views regarding cautery. Creating a layer of dead/burnt flesh is great because it plugs bleeding. Cautery is great for bleeding. Problem is that same plug is dead tissue, prone to decay via bacteria which may then directly access to your blood via the original injury you were staunching. It’s like you’re making a scab on the spot, but it may not be a sanitary piece of scab.

If cautery is your method of removing an already-infected bite wound, you are really just using it to make-dead a portion of your flesh that’s larger than the bite. If you don’t then remove that part, you’re kind of just back where you started for infection potential. Might be a means of slowing the infection temporarily, might damage a larger area and allow it to spread faster through damaged tissue. Remember, dead tissue has no immune response, and does not act as a good barrier between healthy interior tissue and disease.

Another thought of mine is a misunderstanding of heat for santizing: Heat doesn’t insta-kill all infections. Look up the boiling temperature and time required to destroy botulism for food-canning purposes (It is an interesting thing to know about. I prefer pickling for this same reason). Getting a knife to stay hot enough, apply it evenly to the whole infected area, and apply it long enough for the heat to kill, is something I consider too hard to do under duress of inflicting pain upon oneself.
However, applying heat to the blade as a means of sanitizing the blade might be very easy by comparison.

Here’s a proposal: Keep the apply-knife function. Keep it requiring a heat source. Change the text and some of the behaviour thus:

You heat your [blade item] to sterilize it.

Give the blade the [Hot] tag, and make the Clean Wound function of (a)pplying a blade dependent on it possessing this tag. (Hot) tag would wear off same as it does for food.

You cut the infection out before it gets worse. It hurts like hell! You don't think you got it all.

If cutting the infection out takes time, the blade might need re-heating again.

You cut the infection out before it gets worse. It hurts like hell! The remaining wound looks healthier.

Successive attempts to remove infected portions of a wound could deal (potentially) increasing damage to the body part in question. (Chance of damage affected by medical skill? Either way the pain amount would have to be re-balanced to account for the damage.) You could, theoretically, render a bitten limb unuseable through repeated attempts to clean it. This threat is a better cap than any “two tries and you’re out” method imo.
The resulting cleaned wound could still have a chance of re-infection. Alternatively, a harsher solution might only set it back to the very first stage of infection. Bandages could potentially be re-worked as an item that lowers the chance of reinfection, or gives a bonus to recovering from them naturally.

Please chew the hell out of this approach, feedback is very interesting and my history lecture is about to start. It’s three hours long. We can ignore the bandage idea and focus on just how last-ditch wound cleaning should work first, if that simplifies things.