"I appreciate the thought but I'd rather focus on getting acclimated and finding a job and so forth."

"I guess that's sensible of you and all." Elix fidgets for a bit, then smiles brightly at Bruce. "Does your world have badminton? Badminton's great." 

"We do have badminton! Which is pretty weird given that we have thousands of years of divergent history. Do you have baseball and basketball and football too?"

"We have basketball! And 'kickball' but I don't know if that's the same thing as football. I've never heard of 'baseball', how does that work?" 

"We have a thing called kickball and two things called football and they're all different! Baseball has a big field with four points in a diamond, and one team is scattered around the field and throws a ball at one member of the other team, and they're supposed to hit the ball with a stick as it's coming at them and then run as far as they can around the diamond before the other team can chase down the ball from where they hit it to and tag them out with it." 

"Having two things that're both called football is so silly! Do they not standardize words for things in your world?" 

The doorbell chimes in the distance. 

"One moment, let me go talk to your father." Cassea slips out. 

"Sometimes people try to standardize words for things but we have a lot of different countries and languages and dialects and everyone wants to keep their way of saying things. How many languages does this planet have?"  

"Oh, lots! But the one we're speaking right now is pretty much the standard global one, for trade and government work and all that. I think there are still a handful of nation-states where it's not the first language most people learn as kids, but - not that many." 

"There are loads of languages in the Underworld! Lots of them are ones that people made up for fun when they were writing a story, though, and then some got popular." 

"Bruce! This is my husband, Dale, and his brother Pevas." 

Dale strides forward, looking delighted. "Bruce! I heard you're a doctor back in the world you're from?" 

Pevas just nods. 

"Pleased to meet you! I am, yes; I heard you wanted to compare our world's medical practices?"

"I do!" He grabs a seat and leans in toward Bruce. "What's your specialization?" 

"I never had the self-discipline to pick one!" he laughs. "I was a practicing GP for a while but my research was mostly on aging, and I kept up with the journals on a lot of things. How about you?"

"Fascinating, your world sounds very different on specialization! I practice mainly on the medication management side, with folks over sixty for the most part, though I'll get referrals every so often for young people with chronic conditions that are more common in the demographic I see." He ducks his head. "Oh, and I also lead a research team. Right now we're looking at a few different preventative care initiatives." 

"Oh, interesting--we don't tend to have dedicated medication management people, outside of a couple things like pain management; mostly people specialize by organ system. What sort of preventative interventions?"

"A couple of recent drugs being trialed for slowing aging processes, actually! Other than that, it's pretty much all neighbourhood planning and how that correlates with lifestyle differences that have downstream effects on health. We're running a big longitudinal study on whether urban noise and poor noise-isolation in houses correlates with stress-related illnesses like heart disease years later." 

"Neat! That reminds me of a study I saw on zoning laws, neighborhood air quality, respiratory illness, and cognitive function . . . " 

Bruce is happy to go on exchanging nifty results for quite a while. The emerging pattern seems to be that Earth has fast drug discovery but a harder time getting together a large representative cohort and keeping track of the participants for times on the order of years.

Dale is rapt! 

Their world definitely doesn't have much problem doing huge representative cohort studies over long periods of time! The way Dale talks about it makes it sound like a lot of the relevant data is being collected in a centralized way already, just for bureaucratic and medical-system tracking purposes, and it's not much additional hassle to pull particular chunks of it for research. They do consent for participation in studies, like Earth, but for the purely observational ones this is basically just 'sending a mass email with a yes/no checkbox'. 

Drug discovery on the Surface is slower than Earth. A lot of drug-development work actually happens in the Underworld, but from there it tends to be a long process to get adoption on the Surface. Though it does mean that the very early drug trials, purely looking at safety in humans, are generally skipped. The Underworld doesn't have good data collection, not the way the Surface does, but word gets around, and the Surface usually won't consider testing a new drug unless it's been used by thousands of people without any scary anecdotes popping up. 

Pevas is a lot more taciturn than his brother; he mostly listens, occasionally scratches some shorthand notes with a tablet and stylus. 

"What do local government structures look like on Earth?" he eventually asks Bruce, during a lull in the medical nerdery. 

"So, different countries do it a lot of different ways, but it's pretty common to have a mayor or a town council or both. A lot of stuff in the States is a combination of elections and 'whoever most wants to make sure something gets done'. And then some countries the smaller towns have all the elders making the decisions sort of collectively."

"How fascinating! That would be - predominantly a Chaos style of making decisions, here. Myself, I'm on the city council for Kast. Planning to run for the Head of Finances position, this coming year." 

"And here I can be grateful that the world has all sorts. His job sounds unbearable to me."