I could have interviewed Dr. Arsalan Azam about lots of different things. I could have asked for stories from his nearly 10 years of working in emergency medicine: delivering babies, assessing the schizophrenic and the suicidally depressed, working in a New York City hospital in which half of his patients were homeless people. I could have sought his opinions about problems in the world of medicine: the way that hospital staffing is mismanaged by greedy agencies, the way that mainstream psychiatry has brought “no real medication innovation in 50 years” due to inadequate drug-development funding.
(He says that generally, when practicing medicine in the profit-centered system we all live with, “even if it is terribly obvious how you can improve things, there’s no way to get paid for that improvement.”)