Complete Guide to the Medicine Skill in D&D 5e
A common pick for Clerics that never actually ends up being used by them, Medicine is a skill that you’d think would be invaluable in a game about fighting deadly creatures, but the prevalence of magical healing makes it much less useful in practice. The main uses for Medicine are to stabilize a creature that is dying, determine causes of death, identify diseases and plans to treat them, and general questions about the bodies of humanoids.
Using Medicine to Stabilize Creatures
If a creature is at 0HP but not dead, you can, as an action, make a DC 10 Medicine check to stabilize that creature, meaning it is no longer dying and does not need to make death saving throws. That creature is still unconscious and can still be killed by attacks resulting in 3 failed death saving throws (a melee attack against a downed creature results in 2 failures, and a ranged attack results in 1). If this sounds familiar, it might be because it is the same effect as the Spare the Dying cantrip.
First off, this being such an easy check is a real knock against that spell, but more on topic, this is not a very good effect. That creature is still out of the fight and very vulnerable to death, and you wasted your action to stabilize them instead of killing the creature that downed them. In addition, if that DC 10 check is too much for your character to perform reliably, a Medicine Kit allows you to stabilize a creature with no roll required. This very cheap and easily accessible item completely negates the biggest use of the Medicine skill.
So where does that leave us? Well, there’s just not much reason to take this skill. You’d think that a skill called Medicine would allow you to heal HP in some way, but no. This means the only reason to take it is for general knowledge checks about the bodies of humanoids.
Let’s start with diseases. Diseases are very rarely even thought about by DMs, and when they are, there are so many ways to cure them that they are generally no more than a speed bump in a session. The Paladin’s Lay on Hands for example can use 5hp of its pool to cure any disease. Identifying a disease is frequently unnecessary as curing it is just as easy!
Identifying cause of death could come up in mystery style campaigns, though a spell like Speak with Dead can accomplish the same result and more. Additionally, it is normally pretty easy to tell what killed someone, only in extreme circumstances is the cause of death masked.
Finally, general knowledge about the bodies of humanoids might come up once or twice in an entire campaign, and the roll likely won’t be that consequential.
I’d be surprised if you get asked to make a Medicine check more than 5 times in a level 1-20 campaign. Even on a character who’s fantasy is to be a supportive healer (which, to be clear, is not a good playstyle), taking this skill proficiency is more than likely going to be a waste. Skip this one entirely, you have much better options on every class that can select this.
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