Natural Medicine with Battle Medicine

Does the Medicine skill have hidden uses you don't know about?

Doesn't every skill?

Remember that skills are abstractions of knowledge, expertise and ability. So in addition to the mechanical benefit (that of stabilizing a character when a healing kit isn't available), it also has other benefits.

Things that could require a medicine check:

• Diagnosing a wound in certain situations (can you move this guy who just fell off of a building, or will that harm him further?)
• Are these herbs useful for medicine/potion creation? (though this is the domain of the herbalism kit, it's probably a place of strong overlap)
• Diagnosing Disease, or even what poison has affected a character.

In addition to a number of other things.

This gets to a larger point about skills; yes, skill slots are valuable, and no you probably don't need Medicine as a skill, but as a party you probably want someone to have it, or at least someone like a bard who will get half proficiency in it.

Ultimately, skills like this one are going to come up way more in the exploration and social interaction phases of the game than in the combat phase. But that's ok, that's supposed to be 2/3 of the game, not a small part by any stretch.

Yes.

Thats the mundane way of recovering wounds from battle. Also called Natural Healing. Any character can recover wounds by resting for 8 hours, limited to once per day, regardless of how much he rests or how much aid he recieves.

The Heal skill simply allows a wounded character to recover faster.

You will notice that Treat Deadly Wounds says the character must recieve treatment no more than once per day, and no longer than 24 hours after being wounded. Which specifically prevents that type of treatment from being used more than once.

But for Long-term Care there is no restriction, other than spend 8 hours treating the patient(s). That is actually the slowest form of healing available.

Also keep in mind that the character recovering for 8 hours will recover only his double healing rate (2 hp per level) from your Long-Term Care, and not the quadruple (4 hp per level), as he requires a full day of complete rest.

For a complete rest, the character must make no stressing activity for the day if you want to recover. What is a stressing activity is left to the GM, but most assume that any skill check, combat, travel or spellcasting counts as stressing.

You can even Provide Long-Term Care with your downtime. Or while Travelling (which is a common use of the skill), as that is considered light activity for the healer.

Giving long-term care counts as light activity for the healer.

Which means you could even treat someone while recieving long-term care yourself. You simply cannot treat yourself this way, or recieve quadruple the healing as that requires complete rest.

A Mobile Hospital can be used to double the amount healed aswell.