Pomegranate Health

Adverse drug events cause 5-15% of admissions to hospital and drug-drug interactions make up about a fifth of these. Most common are pharmacodynamic situations where two drugs have a similar outcome thereby overdoing the intended outcome. Pharmacokinetic interactions are more complicated to understand as they’re more indirect. For example, while medications are cleared by oxidative metabolism in the liver and gut, there are many drugs that interfere with the function of the cytochrome enzymes...

Diabetic ketoacidosis can be life-threatening but there’s some variability in the way it’s managed between health settings. Intervention involves intravenous insulin administration, hydration, electrolyte replacement and treatment of the underlying precipitant. In a survey of practitioners from 31 different hospitals in Australia there was an even split between those organisations which followed a fixed rate insulin infusion protocol, usually based on bodyweight, or a variable rate infusion p...

Cerebral microbleeds are a finding on MRI that are usually asymptomatic. There are two main aetiological pathways, one occurring as a result of uncontrolled hypertension and the other from the accumulation of amyloid-beta peptide. The link between cerebral amyloid angiopathy and Alzheimer’s Disease is not understood and even the impact that cerebral microbleeds more generally have on cognition. For the study discussed today, clients of an Australian memory clinic were retrospectively as...

Pomegranate Health marks ten years of podcasting since its launch in June 2015. This episode will be one of two samplers that dip into the back catalogue of 131 episodes to showcase some of the most compelling stories. You’ll hear how podcast themes are identified from all the domains of medicine and professionalism. And a little bit about the motivations of long-time producer and presenter, Mic Cavazzini. Pomegranate Health has several thousand listeners in over 150 countries. Three quarters...

Despite filling more than half of places in Australian medical schools, women represent 45 per cent of all medical practitioners and just 36 per cent of specialists. Female representation dwindles further in many areas of clinical leadership, prompting what has been termed a “leaky pipeline”. It has been reported that women would progress at similar rates to men, and achieve similar remuneration, were it not for the time taken out from the profession to raise children. In this podcast we disc...

There is evidence that six months or more off the job leads to some loss of practical skills and knowledge and certainly, many doctors report a loss of self-confidence. People take time out from medical practice for many different reasons but career breaks to raise children are more common than ever before. Senior staff at Sydney Children’s Hospital have developed a day-long workshop to help medics brush off the cobwebs before they return to practice. It involves rehearsal of specific skills,...

In Aotearoa-New Zealand, the proportion of doctors identifying as Māori has doubled from where it was a decade ago to over 5 percent. But there is still a long way to go before the workforce is representative of the broader population which is 17 percent Māori. The Auckland and Otago Medical Schools have in recent years turbocharged their intake of Māori and Pasifika students but these graduates don’t seem to have trickled through to the RACP in great numbers. Just 3.5 percent of general phys...