Needs Help: Harmful Healing

Healing Suffering - the temporary pain or other kind of suffering likely/certain to occur during treatment; whether treatment is effective or not is not the concern.

Examples would include fever or pain caused by the immune response, having to drink a gross mixture or having leeches placed on body. Some healers might invoke this trope by deliberately making treatments more painful than necessary (e.g. to make sure the patient will think twice before injuring themself again).

Healing Tradeoff (or Healing Sacrifice) - the treatment comes with a damage to the patient or other debilitating side effect. Sometimes it's short-term (using up patient's energy is a common variation), sometimes long-term or permanent. The damage/side effect is likely/certain to occur, but it's still preferable to leaving the patient not treated at all.

Examples would include amputation (when it's due), transplantation (which requires taking immunosuppressants afterwards) or chemotherapy. Ribs damage associated with CPR might also count, because while it doesn't happen all the time, the risk is still there even when procedure is performed correctly.

Harmful Healing Method - applying the treatment method is worse than treating the condition itself, whether the method is successful at alleviating/removing the treated symptoms or not. The key point is that the method itself is inherently harmful, even when performed perfectly. The healer might not know about the harm typical for the treatment method, or they might know about it but don't care.

Examples would include lobotomy, drinking mercury for medical purposes, possibly Worst Aid items.

Healing Gone Wrong - the treatment method might be helpful when performed correctly, but the treatment itself causes more harm than expected. Reasons may vary: performing treatment poorly, lack of crucial information about patient, incorrectly diagnosed condition and so on. Alternatively, the usually helpful treatment becomes harmful under specific circumstances (especially when it comes to automatic healing).

Unlike Harmful Healing Method it applies to single attempts at healing or circumstances affecting the process rather than overall treatment method (though certain Harmful Healing Methods might lead to Healing Gone immediately Wrong). Unlike Healing Tradeoff the damage done goes beyond accepted losses; there may be overlap if a risky procedure results in worse complications than healer accounted for (e.g. CPR-caused lung injury results in the person dying).

Examples include amputating the wrong leg, accidentally replacing heart with potato, giving the patient a medicine they're allergic to etc.

Malicious Healing - healing-like abilities are deliberately used in a harmful manner. This may be an attack from the start, or it may be disguised as an actual treatment. Properly healing someone as a part of malicoius plan doesn't count - the harm must come from the "healing".

Unlike Healing Gone Wrong, the adverse effects are entirely expected and intended. Might apply to abilities with the Healing Tradeoff, if the intent is to inflict the tradeoff damage rather than cure the target.

Examples would include turning people into Body Horror abominations, fusing someone with a stone or killing an undead boss with revival item.

The first sentence is most definition-like ("Harmful Healing is..."), and it specifically mentions treatments that cause "more harm than good" (i.e. the cure is worse than the condition). This alone excludes beneficial versions of Healing Suffering and Healing Tradeoff, which - while harsh - are still better than leaving the condition untreated.

This phrasing seems to favour Harmful Healing Method (maybe also Malicious Healing) as opposed to Healing Gone Wrong - it implies the healer might be competent at applying the treatment, but the treatment itself is harmful.

The description suggests that Comically Inept Healing applies when harm is a result of healer's incompetence instead of treatment method. However, judging by description and examples of Comically Inept Healing, it seems to cover instances when someone incompetent suggests/applies incorrect treatments rather than performing them poorly.

Applying the incorrect treatment might lead to Healing Gone Wrong, but often it ends with the characters considering a silly or outlandish cure and receiving proper treatment shortly afterwards. Thus, while there's an overlap I'd consider Comically Inept Healing to be a separate concept from Harmful Healing Method and Healing Gone Wrong and not involve it in repair efforts.

This paragraph - being the first paragraph in the trope - might allude to Healing Suffering interpretation. It implies the treatment being effective, and the "make you wish you were never born" part makes me imagine some unbearable pain rather than becoming some kind of Frankensteinian abomination.

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Pearl Jam's powers give food this effect. Any food or beverage affected by it will be especially delicious and restorative, but also detoxes the affected by forcefully expelling things such as rotted teeth and even intestines, though afterwards you'll feel better than before.
• Doctor Reynold's medicine in Superior is supposed to hurt when it heals. The guy is a self-proclaimed sadist.
  Invoked trope.
• The Sundering presents a character who'd previously been healed this way (i.e. via magical bones-mending), and, as a combined preparation for war and punishment for disobeying his master, has the bones of his right arm magically restored to normal so he can wield a sword. Unfortunately for him, the original breaks must all be recreated before the damage can be repaired.
• In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Gilderoy Lockhart fixes Harry's broken wrist... by making the bones vanish entirely. Of course, this being the wizarding world, there's a cure for that too. (Maybe this is a common side-effect of botching a bone-mending spell?) It's called "Skele-Gro". Unfortunately, Skele-Gro regrows bones gradually, so the patient will have to endure a night or two of bone splinters forcing their way through muscle, blood and nerves, since, for reasons unknown, even competent doctors don't use anesthesia for that process.
• Healing in The Wheel of Time normally causes mild discomfort approximately equivalent to being dunked briefly in ice water. Sometimes, when the ailment that is being Healed is too strong, it can give the subject seizures. And when Semirhage is Healing you, she always makes it very painful so as to remind you not to get injured again.
  Invoked trope again.
• The titular substance of the Coldfire Trilogy can be used to heal, but the process isn't pleasant.
• In Eclipse, when Jacob's ribs get broken, the others have to keep re-breaking them because they keep healing incorrectly.
  Overlaps with Healing Gone Wrong.
• Treatment for burns can be excruciatingly painful, especially when you get up to second-degree. Debridement and Escharotomy are common treatments, and are, respectively, to scrape the burned tissue of the skin and to slice the skin open in long incisions. They are as horrifyingly painful as they sound.

• Naruto:
  • Tsunade developed a form of this as her emergency backup, the Creation Rebirth Seal. While it instantly heals all her wounds, the downside is that the healing is based on rapid cell division. Due to the Hayflick limit, this means that each use shortens her lifespan and ages her body.
  • Naruto himself faces a variant of this. When he draws on the Kyuubi's tainted chakra it damages his body. At the same time, his Healing Factor prevents this from becoming critical, but the rapid healing works to shorten his lifespan like with Tsunade.
    I don't know Naruto, but I assume both Tsunade and Naruto are aware of the price of their healing methods.
• Miranda Lotto's Innocence in D.Gray-Man functions something like this. She doesn't so much heal injuries as temporarily take them away, and once her Innocence is deactivated they all come flooding back at once (which has, on one occasion, led to characters taking fatal injuries and fighting on, only to have to face their death at the end of the fight anyway.)
• Members of the Eye of Michael in the Trigun manga are able to use special vials to regenerate injuries, but these also cause rapid aging. This is the reason why Wolfwood appears to be in his thirties despite only being in his late-teens, and ultimately he ends up overdosing to defeat Livio and Razlo, and dying.
  Assuming the aging effect is known and accepted by characters.
• In the Superman: Savage Dawn storyline, the Man of Steel learns that Kryptonite can burn away the changes done to his cells by killing the altered cells, granting him brand new powers in the process. However, the Kryptonite is also killing his healthy cells in the process. Superman, being Superman, is quite fine with it. [...]
• In Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders and Fool trilogies, the Skill can be used to accelerate healing or fix otherwise irreparable injuries, but it badly taxes the patient's body and drains their energy reserves.
• Even when done correctly, life saving techniques such as CPR and the Heimlich can injure or break your ribs, leading to several weeks of it being painful to breathe. This is still generally considered preferable to not being able to breathe at all.

• Franken Fran will keep her patient alive by any means possible. Quality of life, however, is beyond her comprehension. Needless to say, many of Fran's patients usually wind up in some truly horrific bodily state by the time she's done with them.
• In the Transformers series put out by Marvel Comics, a substance called "Nucleon" was developed on a robotic planet to serve as a miracle cure, but the patients who were treated with it went insane and murdered their doctors. [...]
• I Am Legend reveals that the cause of the virus that killed most of humanity and turned the rest into Darkseekers was a cure for cancer involving a modified measles virus.
• Charles Jacobs in Stephen King's Revival uses his experiments in electricity to cure people of various ailments. It soon becomes apparent that there are dangerous side effects.
• Heroin was invented by Bayer Pharmaceuticals ("Heroin" was originally a Bayer trademarked name for the chemical diacetylmorphine) and marketed as a cough suppresant and a cure for morphine addiction. From a Certain Point of View, it worked—heroin actually is a good cough suppressant, and people who took it were no longer addicted to morphine.

• The Flash: Impulse's accelerated healing caused him problems when he was shot in the kneecap by Deathstroke the flesh quickly regrew over the bullet, requiring intensive and painful surgery.
• When The Savage Dragon's bones are prevented from setting, they simply heal in whatever position they're already in, so having all his bones broken and being stuffed into a smokestack leaves his body horribly malformed, requiring that he have his bones broken again so they can be set properly.
• Anne McCaffrey's Acorna books: Healing effects that mend broken bones may cause the bones to knit together and regrow before the fracture has been properly set, leading to pain and deformity. This happened to a character.
  Tentative. This depends on whether the problems with the healing method are universally accepted risk - making it more of Healing Tradeoff - or result from applying the treatment improperly.
• Magicians in The Black Magician Trilogy 'verse heal their wounds automatically when unconscious. As above, this can lead to bones healing in warped and deformed ways, which requires re-breaking and resetting by a properly trained healer.
  Is there a policy against examples from unrelated works referencing each other? This "As above" makes it too reliant on example from unrelated entry, I think...
• In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Gilderoy Lockhart fixes Harry's broken wrist... by making the bones vanish entirely.
• Because Healing (in Wheel of Time) [...] draws on the energy in the patient's body to do its work, if the person is very weak (for instance, from blood loss) it can actually be fatal to Heal them.
• In Eclipse, when Jacob's ribs get broken, the others have to keep re-breaking them because they keep healing incorrectly.
  Overlaps with Healing Suffering.
• In the Newsflesh universe, two well-meaning scientists engineered viruses, one to cure the common cold, the other to cure cancer. Both did what they were intended to do. The problem is that when "Kellis flu" met "Marburg Amberlee", the result was a Zombie Apocalypse. Pesky side-effect.
• Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva or FOP, a disease that causes the body's self-repair system to replace damaged soft tissue with bone. It has the potential to eventually lead to And I Must Scream when the afflicted individual's limbs become too rigid to move.

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • In Part 4, when Josuke gets angry, his Stand's ability to heal/repair objects goes a bit out of his control. Ask the guy whose nose was basically turned into a pig snout.
    Also, Josuke uses this against Angelo - he uses his healing-like ability to fuse Angelo with stone.
• Oboro from Psyren uses his healing ability to inflict Body Horror on his enemies as readily as he heals his allies.
• The Yakuza leader Overhaul in My Hero Academia has a Quirk that lets him break apart things at a molecular level and reassemble them however he wishes. He can use this on people, rebuilding them and thus healing wounds and curing injuries. The victim does, however, have to experience the agonizing pain of being torn apart and put back together.
  The malicious aspect of the healing ability is repeatedly tearing the victim apart and putting them back together, of course.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The End of Time": The Master hijacks a medical device designed to cure entire planets at once by applying a set template. He alters the device so that it applies a particularly specific template to the entire Earth: his own body.

• In Kara no Kyoukai Araya Souren repairs Fujino's cracked vertebrae and restores her sense of feeling. Yes, this is an evil act. Araya knows good and well why, and a lot of people wind up dead.
  I'm not familiar with the work, but it sounds less like healing itself harms the patient and more like someone being healed causing bad consequences further down the road.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Done deliberately against the user of Highway Star; the guy was already injured and tried to pull a "Don't Kick Them While They're Down" defense... so Josuke healed him back to perfect health and then threw him out the window.
    Again, the healing itself isn't harmful; it's just used as a setup for the harm to come.