Neurals

Artemisia has highly-developed neural technology that allows for a number of medical treatments, from pain relief to advanced nerve repair. They're common enough that pharmaceuticals are considered a bit exotic and even looked down on as something that those weird telepaths have to use.

Utility

Medical uses include, but are not limited to:

• Temporarily dampening the neural pathways that register pain, thus relieving all manner of painful conditions and providing local anaesthesia
• Heavier sedation and generalized anaesthesia for surgery
• Locating the separated ends of axons within individual severed nerves, thus allowing their repair. The process often takes multiple visits even with high-end machines that can track and stimulate growth and healing in multitudes of nerves at once. Thus the prognosis of a spinal injury is much better in Artemisia, but restoring full function can still take a long time
• Migraine treatment

Prohibited misuses include but are not limited to:

• Mental-health care. In fact, research and development of neurals that affect the higher mind directly rather than working by way of the body (and sometimes the brain stem) are explicitly against the law. Any illicit attempts to directly influence others' thinking or perspectives have proven completely unsuccessful, due to the complexity and variability of the human brain and the multiple, interwoven factors involved in thought and feeling. As a result, this is one of the few applications in which pharmaceuticals may be used in Artemisia, though another major one is wrangling one's telepathy and the association with telepaths has stigmatized the treatment for everyone.
• Stimulating sensation for non-therapeutic purposes. The law makes no distinction between pleasant or unpleasant stimuli--it's illegal across the board. This has thus very much become the domain of criminal organizations, where applications run the gamut from the relatively inocuous--say, selling immersive VR for entertainment--to the dark and violent.

Social Impact

For the most part, neurals have the same effect and ramifications as any modern medical technology in the real world. They are well established in Artemisia and have been for some time. However, when used in conjunction with Regenerative Surgery, they make it possible for people to recover more completely from serious injuries than we currently can in the real world. For Artemisians, the danger lies more in not surviving an injury long enough to receive treatment in the first place.

Access & Availability

Neurals are widely-used treatments available in hospitals, doctor's offices, and in some instances do-it-yourself booths or household units. They have also been co-opted into the criminal world, where they are used in ways that--to put it mildly--have not been medically-approved.

Complexity

Neurals are extremely complex--with specialized components to boot--and not something that most people could assemble in their basement. It is far more common in illicit circles for technicians to modify existing machines that have been prescribed--or stolen from organizations that possess them legally. Criminal technicians have also become masters in the art of using unmodified machines in creative ways.