Is there any reason to have medicine better than herbal?

[Super Earth President]

All of my colonists have high medical skill and most of the time i don't even need medicine to save them and i mostly use medicine only for surgeries. So is there any reason to make better medicine?

[Chewy102]

Higher tier meds gives higher %s bandages before pawn skill is applied. That means you will recover faster on average from basic wounds and infections. It will also make treating the more pesky event sicknesses go by MUCH faster as you can hit 100% more often to cure them in less treatments.

There isn't really a need to stock higher tier meds though. Herbal should do you well enough for most cases. But it is always nice to have something just in case Randy wants to screw you over.

[HunterSilver]

Surgeries, illnesses, and if you're doing emergency triage outside of your base. Colonists don't use any medicine when traveling in a caravan on the world map, so it can be vital to treat colonists and prisoners before leaving enemy outposts and cities to prevent infections and conditions tend to be unideal for treatment in these bases.

It's always good to have a higher treatment % on injuries as well, I believe that makes them heal faster. This may not be important to you though, as the difference for minor cuts and bruises is insignificant in most cases.

[Jigain]

Herbal medicine has a potency of 60%, industrial grade medicine is 100%, and glitterworld medicine is 160%. Or in other words, industrial medicine is almost twice as potent as herbal, and glitterworld almost three times.

Especially for surgery you want higher grade medicine. A non-bioniced, healthy doctor of a skill level of 10 operating in a clean room will have a 56.7% success chance with herbal medicine, 94.5% success chance with industrial medicine, and 151.2% success chance with glitterworld medicine. If we go even further down for demonstration, a skill 5 doctor under the same conditions will have 37.8%, 63.0%, and 100.8% success chance for each medicine grade, respectively.

Even for treatment, herbal medicine is so bad the base average treatment quality at level 20 medicine is merely 93%, whereas a skill 8 doctor using industrial medicine has a base average treatment quality of 100%. A skill 4 (!) doctor using glitterworld medicine has a base average treatment quality of 96%.

Herbal medicine is mainly worthless once you have access to a stable supply of industrial medicine.

[Narrowmind]

Extremely interesting to read the stats. Thanks guys.

[starbabylon]

The new bloodrot (host quest) disease requires 10 glitterworld medicine to cure (operation).

[gussmed]

It’s all about the maximum treatment level available with a medicine. For injuries, you don’t absolutely need a high treatment level, though it’s still helpful for a variety of reasons. For illness and surgery, it definitely matters.

If you treat a prisoner with blood rot with herbal medications, they WILL die. No matter what your colonist’s medical skill. Industrial medicine is required to keep them alive.

Heart attacks pretty much require industrial medicine. Heart attacks are like a compressed version of an illness - you treat the patient several times in a row, trying to reduce the severity to 0 before the heart attack gets out of control. Herbal medicine generally can’t keep up.

Jigain already covered surgery, and why you want high quality medicine for that.

You can generally outpace most infections and diseases with herbal medicine, but it’s going to take longer to reach 100% immunity, and the peak disease severity is going to be higher.

[Raymond]

some high end surgery cannot be performed with herbal meds and have surgery difficulty modifier that reduce surgery success chance. Which is why the game made it so that a hospital+industrial/spacer med can have over 100% surgery success chance
Also, skills decay, good med and hospital dont.

[Jigain]

Originally posted by starbabylon:

The new bloodrot (host quest) disease requires 10 glitterworld medicine to cure (operation).

I did some math on it in another thread, and concluded that the doctor skill you'd need to counteract the blood rot would (on average) be 9 (with herbal medicine), 4 (industrial medicine), or 3 (glitterworld medicine). These calculations were done on the numbers from before they nerfed Blood Rot from 0.6 severity gain per day to 0.4 severity gain per day, so it should be a little bit lower these days. So while the operation does indeed require 10 glitterworld medicine, even with herbal medicine a decent doctor should be sufficient to stave off the disease, and a poor doctor can do the same with regular or better medicine.