Medical Doctor

Medbay

Wears a cool red and white suit, hangs out in medbay, yells at chemists scientists for not doing their job and gets yelled at by robotics for not letting them do theirs. Space Station 13 is a dangerous place and you can expect to see much of the crew dropping by medbay to be treat their ailments.

Your Tools

Your lockers and the vending machines contain vital equipment needed to save lives. Your hypos and syringes can be loaded with various medicine for ease of use.

• The reagent scanner is an important diagnostic tool. There are separate hand-held devices, every medical PDA includes one and regular health analyzers can be upgraded as well - check the medical vending machines. The PDA's functions are separate (medical scan is on by default), whereas analyzers have an unified readout. You may have to enable the upgrade manually after installing it.

• Medical patches administer a lot of medicine at once and are plentiful. You can also inject chemicals into a blank patch with a syringe.

• Medical belts are a godsend if you're going to work outside of medbay, as they are essentially a medkit you can wear around your waist. Medbay only comes with a couple of these and they cannot be ordered by the QM, so it's in your best interest to snag yours as soon as the round starts. Alternatively, any ordinary tool belt can be used to store tiny and small items, i.e. most of the medical objects.

• You can dissolve pills in a beaker to withdraw medicine in a controlled manner, dispensing with a syringe or dropper.

• With a stable oxygen supply and the ability to dispense certain medicine such as saline, sleepers are decent to prevent further degeneration of a patient's health status and allow anyone to view the occupant's health. Sleepers can also be set to hibernation mode, keeping the occupant asleep while injecting them with rejuvenators automatically. If you have too many severely hurt patients to handle at once, you may want to stick some of the more stable ones in sleepers while you deal with the emergencies first. Sleepers can also be used to treat addictions, which are surprisingly common and hard to get rid of by other means.

Medbay starts with a Head Surgeon. On any given round, there is a random chance that he will be a cardboard box or a medbot. If he's a bot, let him treat minor injuries in the medbay lobby.

Basic First Aid

Your health goggles show you condition of everyone around you at a glance and if you aren't wearing a pair as a doctor, you deserve to be fed to the roboticist. The damage ranges from green (fine) to blinking red (severely injured), to pulsing white (critical) and then finally grey (dead). Equipping your pair of ProDocs with a health analyzer upgrade (check the medical vending machines) is also a good idea, because it makes performing a complete health scan of anybody within a 4 tile radius simply by examining them possible.

Is the patient bleeding? Dress the wounds with bandages or suture, then check their blood level. If it's low, inject saline and use a blood bag on them.

Saline will help stabilize an injured person. Styptic powder works again brute damage and silver sulfadiazine against burns. Charcoal is effective to treat toxin damage. In case of suffocation, use a salbutamol pill. Scan your patient by using your PDA or health analyzer and administer the appropriate medicine.

People who have slipped into critical condition are at risk of falling into shock, cardiac failure or other terrible things and will die rapidly without treatment. CPR will help to keep them properly oxygenated and slow down the deterioration of their health. Just take off their mask and your own and target them with the help intent. A patient who is thrown into cryo without being stabilized will take longer to heal and may die. In emergencies, an injection of epinephrine or atropine can help to rapidly resuscitate your patient, but don't overuse them!

Advanced Medicine

Between cryo, the various first aid kits and medbots, you have enough to treat most common ailments. For a more complex guide, check out Doctoring.

You can also create cures, vaccines and beneficial pathogens. Check Pathology Research for more information.

Using the Cryo Chambers

It's a good idea to invest a minute or two at the beginning of every round and start the cryo system. Make a habit of it.

• Pick up a wrench.
• Click on the O2 canister to connect it to the pipes.
• There should be two beakers of cryoxodone nearby. Pick up one at a time.
• Add one beaker to each cryo tube by clicking on it with the beaker.
• Set the freezer to the lowest possible temperature if necessary. It should be 73.15 K, the default value.
• Flick the power switch and leave it on.

Don't worry about the cryoxadone - it isn't used up unless there's someone inside the tube. However, leaving the chambers on causes a slow but constant gas leak. To avoid draining the O2 canister needlessly, leave the tubes off unless they're occupied.

So, you have an emergency on your hand? Don't panic and follow this checklist:

• Stabilize the patient with CPR or stimulants.
• Check the cyro tube to see whether the gas temperature is still optimal.
• If the patient is wearing any type of exosuit (space suit, lab coat etc.) or headgear (mask, hat), remove them.
• Stuff the patient into an unoccupied tube and turn it on.
• Monitor their recovery. Clicking on the cyro tube will pop up a window with the occupant's current health.
• Once they have fully recovered, the system will eject them automatically. Turn off the cyro tube at this time.
• Verify their status with your PDA or a health analyzer, especially if they had poison in their system or were suffering from heart failure.

To stress the point, it is important that you don't forget to strip your patient of exosuits and headgear. Their body temperature has to fall below a certain threshold, which is unlikely to happen if they still have said items on, or cryoxodone won't work. Plain and simple.

It is also noteworthy that pure oxygen is not a requirement. Should you ever need to replace the gas supply, an air mix canister from emergency storage or the air hookups will work just as well.

The Cloner

Sadly, you won't always be able to save the patient. This is where the cloning apparatus comes into the play, which was formally the geneticist's responsibility and is now open to all medical personnel.

To clone someone, you require a scan of their DNA. This can be collected while they are living, or shortly after they have died. Rotten corpses, skeletons, and husks left by changeling meals aren't clonable. If you get a body like this, hand it over to the roboticists. In some cases they can help, in other cases they can't. It is possible to upgrade the cloner to scan rotten or otherwise unsuitable bodies, but that rarely happens.

To get a DNA scan, grab the subject and then click on the DNA scanner to load them in. Click on the control console with an empty hand, then Scan them. If there is DNA to salvage and the player is still logged in, you will get the scan information. If there is no DNA, the computer will tell you so. If the player is not logged in anymore, there will be a cryptic error about the mind interface failing.

Now, click View Records and find the person you want to clone. Click on their record, and click clone to start the process. If the player is not logged in, the computer will tell you it is unable to start the cloning cycle.

If someone comes in to get scanned of their own accord, they can climb in and jump out of the DNA scanner themselves. This allows a helpful AI to control this process if you have a mind to let it to. If someone has the initiative to come in and get scanned on their own, it is polite to attempt to clone them every 10-15 minutes. The one time it works you can be assured they were dead in a maintenance tunnel somewhere.

Once the cloning process starts, it takes about 2 minutes for it to complete. When a clone stumbles out, they are naked, and usually have some combination of toxin damage and brain damage. Charcoal and mannitol respectively will fix these problems. Give them some new equipment from their old body if it's still around and send them on their way.

Crew Objectives

As a loyal crew member, you can sometimes be assigned some strictly optional objectives to keep yourself busy while you wait for something to happen. As a medical doctor, you can expect to see the following:

Do not commit a violent act all round. Punching someone, or shooting them with a laser will cause you to fail. Disarms are still allowed
Never use the Harm intent, basically. Like it says, disarm actions are still kosher.

Apply at lest 10 medical patches to injured people
Just do what you normally do, and this objective basically completes itself. If for some reason you are lacking in people to treat, just punch yourself a few times and apply a few medical patches, if you don't mind wasting resources.

Ensure that the cryo tanks are on and below 225K at the end of the round
If you get this objective, ignore it until near the end of the round. When the shuttle is about to dock, turn the tanks on. If left on for the whole round, the connected gas canister will be drained fairly rapidly, so don't do it please.

Syndicate Shenanigans

The traitor medic has the right tools for quiet assassinations and all-out rampages. Emagging your hyposprays will let you load them with whatever you want, instantly injecting your targets with any variety of harmful chemicals. Your medical vending machine starts out with a few nice ones (such as sleep toxin), and more potent drugs can be made if you're able to slip into chemistry. Failing that, poison bottles are well-priced and a good option. Emagged sleepers will inject the occupant with poisons, which is best combined with hibernation mode.

Generally, no one will stop to question a doctor dragging an injured crew member or corpse, so long as it's towards medbay. You have equipment to restrain and anesthetize any downed victims, and the roboticist next door may be happy to give you one of his spare flashes. For the more overt killer, you can use the syringe gun, which draws harmful chem of your choice from an internal reservoir and fires them at people.

Also keep in mind that sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between a doctor who harms their patients through idiocy and one who does so through malevolence...

Supplementary Video

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