Pomegranate Health
Welcome to Pomegranate Health, a podcast about the culture of medicine. You’ll hear clinicians, academics and advocates discuss some big questions; How can one make difficult clinical and ethical decisions free from bias? How can communication with patients and peers be improved? How can healthcare delivery be made more equitable and efficient?
This is also the home of IMJ On-Air, where authors of the College's Internal Medicine Journal present their work. Expert advice on the current best standards for your practice.
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At each page there is a MyCPD link for Fellows to log credits for participating in educational activity. Please continue the discussion in the comments section below each episode.
Latest episodes
Ep72: Modelling a Pandemic—Congress 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how hard it is to take decisions affecting the lives of millions when there is so little evidence to go on. Models of viral spread and interventions to mitigate these have become everyday discussion points, but few people understand how hard these are to put together.
Ep70: Zeroing in on “the renal troponin”
After over a two decades of research, commercial assays now exist that can predict onset of acute kidney injury in at-risk patients. But many questions remains as whether these are specific enough to be useful at point of care, and whether we have the interventions to respond to the information they provide.
Ep69: Gendered Medicine—Funding and Research
It’s been said that the health needs of women are undervalued by our fee-for-service model, down to individual item numbers in the Medicare Benefits Schedule. There’s also evidence that disease predominantly experienced by females receive less research investment. Is this blatant sexism or a symptom of other structural imbalance? And what do we do about it?
Ep68: Gendered Medicine- Pain
Gender can be considered a social determinant of health. For example, the taboos around menstruation are so profound that many young women are dangerously naïve about their own reproductive health. Meanwhile, endometriosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other conditions associated with chronic pain have a stigma around them that means self-report are often not taken seriously.
Ep67: Boosting Public Health in the Indo-Pacific
Australia’s Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security provides development assistance to health services as far flung as Fiji, Cambodia and Timor L’Este. Its mission is always tailored to the needs of the development partner, and had to adapt quickly with the sudden demands of the COVID-19.
Ep66: Gendered Medicine- Heart Disease
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for women in most of the industrialized world. Women who suffer from this die at significantly higher rates than men because of discrepancies in the quality of care they receive. In this episode we explore the subtle biases that nudge male and female patients down different health pathways.
Ep65: A New Script for Global Public Health
Intellectual property law has influenced pharmaceutical development and marketing for at least 25 years ago. But it’s not clear whether this is actually the best model for stimulating innovation and addressing the most important global health problems. Closer to home, we also discuss a solution to the jurisdictional conflicts in responding to the pandemic.
Ep64: Big Pharma and the People’s Vaccine
The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated a frenzy of vaccine development never seen before, but also examples of hoarding, price hikes and vaccine nationalism. We discuss where the intellectual property rules have come from and where exceptions are sometimes made for public health emergencies.
Ep63: the WHO’s Biggest Test
During the COVID-19 crisis there has been some criticism of the World Health Organisation as to whether it declared a pandemic soon enough or covered up for China’s failings. In this podcast we examine the role and responsibilities it shares with its member states and where the straining points have been.