8 Medical ninjutsu

It's been a few weeks now and I've only managed to learn the Chakra scalpel technique. Honestly simply because of the foundation laid by gentle fist. Every few days Tsunade would come in to check on my progress and my meals were delivered at the door by some unknown attendants. I say unknown because I've never seen them. Freaking ninja shenanigans.

Now as I sit here with a pile of books twice my size I've understood more or less a few key points of medical ninjutsu.

1. It's annoying.

2. It's annoying.

3. It's annoying.

The use of medical ninjutsu requires very advanced chakra control, decent chakra reserves don't hurt either, oh and an extensive knowledge on such things as herbs, medicines, the human body and poisons. No biggie. That list alone is just the base requirement to perform minimum level medical ninjutsu and that bare minimum is the standard for most medical-nin.

The more advanced medical-nin rely on things that would make you think they should be steam rolling the ninja world. Why? The level of proficiency in chakra control reaches insane levels, knowledge on the Shinobi anatomy[ I don't say human for a reason], the fact they often rely on either yin or yang release, the extensive knowledge on others ninjutsu, their own use of forms of taijutsu, kinjutsu, fuinjutsu, and ninjutsu.

If you're confused, don't be.

Like any doctor on Earth you need to understand the root cause to apply medical treatment. Medical-nin were no different, so they often had extensive knowledge on all jutsu. Not knowledge of every jutsu imaginable or anything, but definitely a large amount of offensive ninjutsus effects on the body were methodically recorded and studied.

So the sheer amount of knowledge that you needed to acquire can be summed up as: annoying.

Then the fact that the chakra control required for all medical ninjutsu is insane. Also made learning it annoying.

At a base level a medical-nin must know Chakra scalpel, Poison extraction, and the Mystic palm technique.

Chakra scalpel is intended to be used for highly accurate incisions necessary for surgeries and anatomical dissections. Unlike regular scalpels, the chakra scalpel can make cuts inside the body without actually creating an open wound, limiting the risks of an infection.

Fairly simple but performing surgery with a chakra scalpel, without also using the Byakugan, seemed irresponsible and extremely difficult.

Poison Extraction is multi functional. When a person has been afflicted by a pathogen or toxin, this medical ninjutsu can be used to draw out the agent and heal the damage.

This though requires for the medical-nin to first be able to identify the cause of the illness. Illness's in the Shinobi world can be caused by jutsu, genetics, poison, environment or many other possibly unknown factors. You can see why'd you'd have to crack a book open, right?

Then, using a chakra scalpel, an incision is made near the affected area. Using their chakra, the medical-nin then pushes a large volume of a medicinal fluid through the incision. The fluid then draws the toxin out of the affected area and serves as a medium through which the toxin is suspended and then forced out of the person's body.

Freaking difficult! The fact that this was a last resort made perfect sense.

In theory you should be able to extract any illness with this method. Cancerous or damaged cells? Pull them out. Bacterial or viral infection? Pull that shit out. Poison? Just pull it out.

The reality though is your injecting and controlling your chakra, a medicinal fluid, and having to locate the offending toxin. This would require microscopic vision and understanding of things at the microscopic level (Bacteria and viruses) and to boot you needed obscene chakra control to pull it off in the first place.

Mystic palm though was quite frankly one of the easiest in theory but one of the hardest to perform in practice.

The user of the mystic palm must apply their hand to the afflicted or wounded part of the body and sends chakra into it, accelerating the body's natural healing abilities.

Now you may be thinking easy enough. Wouldn't that trigger the cell division thing that ages Tsunade or cause cancer though? Well no, the keyword is natural healing.

The reason Tsunades Creation Rebirth ages her is that it's use has a chance of making her cells exceed the Hayflick limit for the rapid healing regeneration it produces. In effect she ends up killing her own cells to get her regeneration effect, this in turn causes her to lower her life span. The remaining cells that don't exceed the Hayflick limit end up causing her to rapidly age. As to how the remaining cells don't cause cancer? The jutsu itself likely has a safeguard so the rapidly divided cells don't mutate. Rapid cell division is not the cause of cancer, a cell mutating is the cause of cancer. The cancerous cell then rapidly divides and affects a larger and larger area of the body resulting in what's know as cancer. Science!

Now although Mystic palms most obvious use is treating external wounds, it can also be used for internal illnesses. Seems simple so far right?

Unfortunately chakra control comes into play once again. To heal the affected area extremely precise control of the amount of chakra being transferred into the patient is key. Too much much chakra thrown in and congratulations you just put your patient in a coma. Then to top it off you're guiding the patients body in the healing process and everything that such a thing entails: ie. cells, blood, dermal and sub dermal layers of the body, nerves, maybe even bones depending on the injury.

With that additional information not so simple anymore right?

Now comes the one cooperative medical ninjutsu you learn. Healing Resuscitation Regeneration.

This is a medical ninjutsu that is used to heal severe, life-threatening injuries. To perform, it requires a full intensive care unit, staffed by medical-nin with refined chakra control. A large, complicated technique formula is drawn around the patient with them at its center, the large scale formula is then focused around the injury to be healed. The healing is then facilitated with the use of the patients cellular sample as a medium.

Once the preparations are set medical-nin take position around the formula's perimeter, notably the corners, and work together to change the medium's cellular makeup, converting it into whatever cells are required for mending the wound. This is where the technique's greatest difficulty lies, as medics must be careful to form the correct cell and then just as carefully apply it to the regenerating injury.

The procedure lasts many hours, requiring the constant attention of the medics on staff and, inevitably, requiring backup shifts to replace medics who have tired out.

Now you put in all that work and still because of how difficult the procedure is, there is a very low chance of actually saving the patient.

These four jutsu more or less encompass everything that is basic medical ninjutsu training. The things that make one a medical-nin apart from them is what you would expect from doctors on Earth. With the added difficulty that not all Shinobi are exactly normal humans and body modifications aren't exactly an irregular occurrence.

On that note the body of a regular "human" shinobi wasn't exactly normal either. Should you cultivate chakra on its own it would basically make you the Hulk on my Earth. A shinobis body was incredibly durable due to chakra which is why they could jump several meters in the air and withstand the physical impact on landing, why their body could withstand even sonic level speeds, and why they were so hard to kill in general.

The key point in all this though is that medical-nin were expected to perform all the jutsu and surgical procedures out in the field. Every medical-nin was a wartime medic who could perform medicine during crisis situations and manage to stay alive themselves.

Going into this I was abundantly confident that with my, admittedly deteriorated, adult mind and with my gentle fist foundation I could become a medical-nin in no time. Ignorance is bliss.