Pathologic 3 is the rare game about healing that knows healing can be cruel
Videogames have given us many fascinating healing mechanics and ideas about healing, from the motley support playstyles of Overwatch to the musical cooldown management of Wild Growth, but one thing developers rarely capture is that healing is an expression of power over somebody. However kind, it has the potential to be demeaning, intrusive, even abusive.
In my experience of doctors and hospitals, healing is a competition between interpretations of sickness and injury, where the doctor has at their disposal all the crushing cultural authority and ornate vocabularies of modern medicine. The patient’s own self-knowledge - amassed over years of living in and with their own flesh - risks being recast as 'amateurish'. And this is before we get into the weeds of different conceptions of bodies and how they relate, which a doctor - especially an overworked, desensitised one, fighting a wider crisis - might be inclined to dismiss as mysticism or superstition.