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I've been looking and I can't find any official methods of healing in after the bomb....other than time and a doctor.

I can't find any animals that can heal in the core book, nor any official revised After the bomb material.
There are no animal healing psionics in the core rules.
Humans can OPTIONALLY have access to ISP based psionics from other PB worlds, but that's optional.

How do you deal with this in your games? Without any methods of fast healing available in most other games (magic, psionics, superpowers, the list goes on), wounds can be fatal or take a character out of the game. If an arms gets wounded, expect not to be using that arm possibly ever again. Now the way SDC works, we tend not to take wounds into account (you take 10sd damage, whose attack in next?) This is a RPG and combat is a part of the game. Without these methods of fast healing, infections and diseases would be much more of a serious risk to your health.

Trying very hard, I can find the earthworm in one of the old ATB books, which can regenerate and there may be crabs, newts & starfish able to regenerate limbs somewhere.

How do you deal with this problem? Is it simply by calling it sdc damage and moving on?

SDC is, well, SDC. Some minor bruising, or a metaphorical "wearing down of defenses" if you prefer. Sort of a "you parried that blow, but it took a lot out of you. A few more like that and he'll really hit you".

I never worried about it until you got into HP damage. That's DAMAGE damage. I've had players get permanent effects from extreme HP damage before. Minor inconveniences at most really, once a player ended up with one less Physical Prowess in his left arm.

As for recovery, good old by the book time and treatment. It makes combat a rather serious event. This ain't WOW, you don't go grinding mobs. If your players are encountering large groups of enemies one after another either they're not planning ahead or you're piling them on too hard.

Of course I do assign the same experience points for successfully negating an enemy as I do for killing an enemy. Tricking a guard into a closet and locking him in gets you the same experience points as nuking him from orbit or going up close and personal. Possibly more, depending on how well it's role played.

This of course means that pretty much Everyone needs to consider defense. Either build up some uber-high parry dodge bonuses, spend money/Bio-e on armor, or accept the fact that if you just soak it all into SDC you might have to retreat for a day or two to recover it back before moving on. And if you're into HP range, well that's the game world telling you it's time to slow down, maybe head back to town to rethink this particular plan.

Brief addendum. I was slightly mistaken, last game we did was actually a Ninja's and Superspies variant. In N&SS SDC recovery is 5 points per hour of solid rest, instead of the 4-6 per day as by the AtB book. If you want a more grind friendly game try that rate of SDC recovery. I'd keep HP recovery as per the book though.

Expect a lot of down time for healing in most AtB games. This goes for the bad guys as well.

Knowing that damage taken will take a long time to heal (and may need the player to role up a new character) will usually lead to better planning and tactics in a game.

Keep in mind that in AtB2, the world went through a golden age of BioTech innovation, so medical treatment probably saw some interesting increases. If you want to add a quick way of healing characters and getting them back in the action consider the following:

* Biotech/Nanotech Triage and Healing Kits (stabilizes critically wounded characters, repairs wounds and mends broken bones)

* Cybernetics/Bionics (for lost limbs, damaged organs)

* Autodocs (Robotic Doctors/Surgeons double healing rate?)

* Cloning or Cloned Organs/Tissue/Bone

These items and options should be rare and only found in the larger cities (Filly, Smoketown, Technoville, etc) and should be expensive.

One note about cybernetics. I've been batting around the idea a having characters that get cybernetics permanently loose some SDC to indicate that they have lost part of themselves (sort of how Shadowrun(?) characters used to loose their humanity as they became more and more cybernetic).