Medicine side effects, whats the point?

[Itseasytosee2me]

So its been years since we’ve ditched the old bicardine, charcoal, style medicines which were easy to make, always effective, and only had downsides on overdose.
There is obvious value in removing those so that medication that has more depth can take their place, and in some places medicine with more depth has been added.

But there are a couple side effects that just make me say, why?
Like libital, which is presumably intended to be your bread and butter brute healing medication. 3 brute a tick and does a little liver damage. What is the point of the liver damage? If its just meant to be flaverful, then fair enough, but its difficult to argue this brings much more depth to the medical system. The effects of liver damage are pretty limited, essentially making you more vulnerable to conventional toxins, and if you get too much your liver fails and you will need to go get surgery. But you would need to heal over a thousand brute damage before the liver damage became something even worth acknowledging. Recovering from the liver damage taken by going all the way from a lethal amount of brute damage to fully healthy would take less than six minutes of natural recovery, so unless you happen to get some toxins in your system within that six minute period, the damage wont even have a slim effect.

Is this incentive to go get surgery instead to provide medical doctors with content? If so, it doesn't function very well because it is much much faster to swallow a pill then to go get surgery from a doctor, and the side effects are negligible. Is it a nudge to interact with botony to get liver healing chems, but whats the point? The side effects are not impactful and if you really wanted to avoid them, it would take less effort to just make one of the superior healing medications.

The same criticism can be applied to pretty much all organ damaging side effects, in that damage does basically noting unless you kill the organ, it takes an obscene amount of chemical to kill the organ, and if you don't kill the organ the damage will self repair in a matter of minutes.

If we want these side effects to matter, we are either going to need to change how organs work, or change what the side effects are.

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

I'm pretty sure it's just for flavor. They're only relevant effects very rarely.

[Itseasytosee2me]

I'm pretty sure it's just for flavor. They're only relevant effects very rarely.

Sure, but then why do we have Salicylic Acid and Oxandrolone, whose entire selling point seems to be lack of side effects?
Those medicines are much less efficient in healing and slower in most realistic scenario compared to their “non-superior” counterparts.
And those medicines aren’t even harder to craft than the core medicines, its literally the same amount of reactions. They seem to be filling exactly the same niche with a slightly different coat of paint. One with a pointless side effect attached, and the other labeled as “more complex” even though it isnt.
As of current, the only effect of having them both in game is enabling chemists to mix them make super fast healing chems which can be churned out infinitely by factories.
I question the chemical bloat that seems to exist.

[BrianBackslide]

The side effects are virtually impossible to balance as they are currently.

In the case of Libital, Liver damage only truly matters when the liver is dead, and in many cases is actually beneficial for it to die as it prevents further damage from ingested/injected toxins. However on the flipside, too much liver damage as a side effect and it becomes a more effective poison than the actual poisons. We've seen this happen in the first few implementations of Cobbymed, to the point that people really DID use medicines as weapons over even poison kit poisons. I myself have destroyed many lungs before the Multiver side effect nerf, for instance.

Organ damage would have to matter, moreso than either "Organ alive" versus "Organ dead." However, that also compounds the "New doctor" accessibility issue that Cobbymed and further medical tweaks have pushed for.

I, for one, would love if medicines didn't have side effects, but rather interactions with other medicines. Like being helped or hindered or having differing effects based on dosage as well as what other medicines may be present. But that also presents a lot of complexity that would potentially scare away new doctors. Chem currently suffers from a lack of depth (No, fermichem is busywork, not depth) but complexity with what chems do in a body may not be the way to go.

[GPeckman]

IIRC, it used to be (around when trekchems were replaced) that medical chems did a lot more organ damage. But, as it turned out, they did so much that they were better at killing people than actual poisons, so it got toned down a lot.