The Flying Spaghetti Monster graces you with one of its noodly appendages and gifts you with a limited power of healing. The power given to you, as revealed by the FSM, is that you can stop a condition getting worse, hopefully allowing the body to recover. So, for instance, you can’t magically instantly fix a broken bone, but a cancerous growth will stop growing and won’t spread. All you have to do is touch the person.
What do you do?
I guess I’d make a beeline to the local Children’s hospital first, though then comes the problem of convincing staff to let me in. Saying, “Hey, I’m here to touch some kids” probably won’t do it. Which means I probably need to fill out a volunteer application and go through the interview process so I can get my foot in the door at the Children’s hospital, perhaps as a food preparer. Once inside, I can perhaps serendipitously sneak into a few rooms, maybe graze an arm or leg, and know I’ve helped out. So I figure I would have finally used my power about 6 weeks after the FSM granted it to me.
Set up a practice with a comprehensive fee structure that includes a 20% pro bono margin.
First touch myself, I’d be doing that anyway. Next start the healing on my kidneys and knees. After that I’d probably go to the kid’s ward at the hospital to hand out presents of some kind so I don’t seem like a pervert touching the kids. I’ll go to kids first in case the FSM decides to remove my powers. If I run across someone fabulously rich and seriously ill I’ll touch them and make sure to let them know I’m curing them.
Start my own religion, of course. That’s where the real money is.
The OP said you can only stop the condition. No curing.
He said you could stop the condition allowing the body to heal itself. I’ll just tell them they won’t get worse and that a cure is not guaranteed.
I’d find faithful people I know who are terminal (not faithful to the FSM, but who believe in the supernatural) and tell them that I’d like to pray with them about their illness. I’d then lay my hand on their back and “pray.” I’d keep records of the people and dates I laid hands on them and use that along with physician verification to support my claim to healing ability.
As the first wave of people verify results, I encourage them to pass the word. Desperate foks begin coming to me in droves so I quit my job and set up shop in some neutral location, likely a church, on the premise that this is a God-given ability. I’d go to hospitals on certain days for the people who are truly immobilized. I accept donations but do not ask for them, maybe set up a GoFundMe (hopefully someone else would on my behalf). Ideally I could get someone to assist me by bringing me food and drink so I could maximize my touching hours.
Eventually I’d likely go on a world tour.
I’m sure it would be dangerous and complicated when people saw the potential for $$$ to be made or for their dear children to be healed. But simplistically, assuming people don’t go crazy, it’s a nice fantasy.
Mass riots, people being trampled to death, being abducted and forced into slavery… Sounds awesome
So how would it work in terms of infectious disease? Like would this power prevent viruses and bacteria from reproducing, or would it just magically prevent them from doing harm, and they’d continue to reproduce willy-nilly?
Your power won’t kill live bacteria but it will stop you being infectious. And in the same vein as the cancer, it will stop them from reproducing.
Seems like completely stopping any disease would basically be a cure. Your body is pretty great at fighting disease.
Find likeable people with cancer and a bunch of money, then stop their cancer for a bunch of money. After that, I quit my job and hang out with my kids.
Dementia. I’d like to stop that fucker in its tracks. While it would be great if I could cure it, I’ll take arresting the progressive forms of it (such as Alzheimers) if that’s the best we’ve got. I get to have this conversation several times a week, “Well, it’s not so bad now. I mean, forgetting where my keys are and losing words and putting the chicken in the cabinet instead of the fridge…that’s not so bad. But I saw where this took my mother, and that scares the hell out of me.”
If I could stop the disease at the “losing a few words and what did I have for dinner last night?” stage, and never see it progress to the combative aphasic pissing and shitting on yourself not knowing your children stage, I’d be a happy nurse.
Set up a mass-production line. See how many people I can touch in a given hour. Put in place a large-ish bureaucracy to maximize throughput.
Fees would be relatively low, but the bureaucracy is going to be somewhat expensive. But the bureaucracy is needed to keep the assembly line moving at maximum capacity.
(Also, physical protection and clinic security. I don’t want some dimbulb deciding that this violates his religious beliefs and firebombing me.)
No promises, I get to sleep, I get weekends, and I get a vacation now and then.
I wonder how many people you’d be able to touch per day. A quarter-million people go through Hartsfield Jackson Intl Airport every day, so that seems reasonable in terms of getting people in and out of a place. After all, they’d only need to walk past you (or zip past on a moving walkway). But there’s no way in hell you’d be able to manage that without sloughing off all the skin on your fingers even presuming the lightest of touches.
Gosh, I don’t know. The first person I’d touch would be Mom; easy enough, because we hug several times a day. After that, I’d have to be very careful!
Missed the edit window: Mom has COPD, fibromyalgia and a chronic migraine.
I would quietly do as much good as I possibly could, but I would not tell anyone about my abilities. If people knew, they would either hate me and try to stop me or they would try to commercialize me and use me to make a profit or charge incredibly high rates to utilize my services.
Although I’d be unlikely to help as many people if I stayed out of the limelight, I would still retain some quality of life myself.
You’d probably develop a really tough callus. Look at the hands of people who work with shovels all day long.
You’re the indispensible element: if you don’t like their policy, you go on strike.
I’d want to be commercialized, although, as QuickSilver noted, that could include a strong pro bono element.
Also, I’m going to donate a lot of blood and tissue to science labs to try to duplicate whatever it is that is unique in my make-up. It may be magic, in which case, too bad for us all. But it might be duplicable.