The Study of Advanced Healing
Advanced Healing is the ability to heal from most things, provided some sort of first aid is applied quickly enough. It is the body's way of keeping itself alive, and is a rather peculiar ability.
For one, the healing factor isn't consistent. It works faster on larger/more severe injuries. For example, some light bruising would heal at the rate of a normal human, and a paper cut slightly faster. Bodily systems that are vital for life seem to get the most priority during healing. The brain, heart, lungs, and certain sections of the spine seem to heal the fastest. Under certain conditions bones will also fuse back together at an astonishing rate.
Adrenaline and cortisol (fight vs. flight) have consistently shown to jump start the healing process, often to the later detriment of the body. In its haste to remove itself from danger the body will often heal things either wrong or just enough to be functional. This results in many corrective measures being taken after the body has 'healed'. The most common corrective procedure is re-breaking bones in order to set them correctly. The second most common procedure is corrective amputation.
Another peculiarity is that Advanced Healing works through blood. This does, admittedly, make some sort of sense based on new scientific developments. Blood is how things like oxygen, waste products, glucose, etc. are distributed around the body. What does not make scientific sense is how shifter blood interacts with humans and each other.
Introducing shifter blood to a human gives that person a temporarily boosted healing factor for a short period of time. Introducing shifter blood to an external wound appears to localize the healing boost, while oral and intravenous blood has a systemic effect. One complication of IV methods is the possibility for rejection if the blood types aren't compatible. In comparison ingesting blood is much safer, but has a limit on how much blood an individual can ingest. If this limit is exceeded the patient will empty the contents of their stomach, losing what benefits the blood could have given them and wasting product.
In comparison introducing shifter blood to a shifter, provided donor and recipient are different individuals, has a more profound effect. Coating an external wound in blood greatly enhances healing of that wound, while oral administration provides not only enhanced healing but a slight invigorating effect. It is uncertain at this time whether this is a physical or psychological phenomenon.
Shifter-shifter blood therapy does have a secondary component deciding effectiveness. The further apart the shifter's animal forms are the greater the healing boost provided. For example, providing blood to a fox shifter from the same species of fox would have the least effectiveness, blood from a different species of fox would work better, blood from a different type of canid would work even better, blood from a different type of mammal even better still, and so on and so forth, all the way out to invertebrates. However, invertebrate blood should be used as a last resort due to scarcity.
Transdermal application of blood appears to have little to no effect in either shifters or humans if there is no readily available entry point into the body. Bloodborne diseases seem to be of no concern between shifters, but care should be taken when introducing blood to a human. Administering shifter-to-shifter transfusions has gone poorly in every trial. Only shifter-human or human-shifter transfusions have had any success.
-excerpt from misfiled research notes in The Archives
