[whswhs]

In my current campaign, one of the PCs asked her NPC ally to put on his sealskin and go spy on an approaching ship, and he critically failed the roll and got stuck half seal and half selkie. Another PC used her Esoteric Medicine to try to unbind him, and found the right massage points to get him loose.

I don't view Esoteric Medicine as a purely psychic or mystical skill. Rather, I think of it as a combination of empirically useful techniques for treating symptoms (even weird ones like using electric fish to treat gout or migraines) with prescientific theories for why they work and classifications of different effects. The ability to use it to get the benefits that would be possible if those prescientific theories really worked is the cinematic part, and is appropriate to campaigns where chi is real, and maybe to weird science campaigns.

If I wanted to mechanic treating disease by freeing someone from spiritual affliction, I'd use the Exorcism rules. Exorcism seems to be one of the oldest of all healing skills.