How does it work?
Yeah, we know the bodies of living organic beings heal on their own (or, at least, without willful input) through a series of chemical reactions (which, by the way, are very cool if you take a look at them on a fine-point level). This is called convalescence, just in case anyone else likes throwing around big words as much as I do. We can probably assume that healing potions replicate this effect in some sense, with greater speed and/or effectiveness, and fewer physical restrictions (i.e. bandaging for binding, or splints for setting while a heal effect is processing, although that might be a neat idea).
What, though, happens when an inorganic being is subjected to healing magicks? I'm talking golems, robots, elementals, and incorporeal entities.
Shini asked me a long time ago what my opinion was on healing robots, specifically, and the question hasn't really faded from my memory much since. At the time I advocated the standpoint that healing magic could be the opposite to entropy, a force that encourages all things towards order. I remember making a comparison to cardiac cells--if you see individual heart cells, each has its own pulse, its own rhythm. But when you bring two together, they synchronize their beating almost immediately, so the two have one pulse. In a similar way, healing magic could give that aspect to unliving parts, so that they 'want' to be together, to function as a whole.
But it doesn't have to be that way, of course. There's also the school of thought that says healing is literal Holy power, and since the sentient races are aspects or descendants of the Divine, the Holy power rejuvenates and repairs.
Another interesting way that I've heard healing magic done is by warping time--by bringing the past body into the present, wounds from the interim can be 'written out.' Or there's the possibility of somehow causing an attracting force between the lost bodily matter and the intact bodily matter (which would cause a fairly eerie effect of blood flying away from an attacker's sword and back to its original host...).
Any number of interesting variants are possible, and it merits consideration so that we have some idea what to do when one of the weird cases comes up. Or even just as an intellectual exercise. What's your opinion? More ideas?