Pomegranate Health
Episodes
<<REWIND>> Genomics for the generalist
21 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Pomegranate <<REWIND>> we go back to some classic episodes from the last ten years that have stood the test of time. The first throwbac...
Ep146: Dealing with the next pandemic 2- lockdowns and human rights
05 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
While waiting for COVID-19 vaccines to be rolled out, Australian jurisdictions adopted strong social restrictions to minimise community transmission o...
Ep145: Dealing with the next pandemic 1- border closures and vaccine mandates
30 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
While waiting for COVID-19 vaccines to be rolled out, Australian jurisdictions adopted strong social restrictions to minimise community transmission o...
[Case Report] 62yo undergoing procedure for a lung nodule
15 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A 62‐year-old man is undergoing a CT‐guided core biopsy of a lung nodule when he develops an iatrogenic pneumothorax. After admission to the Royal...
Ep143: On the ground with MSF
01 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Médecins Sans Frontières has projects in more than 70 countries that might be affected by natural disasters, armed conflict or disease outbreaks. It...
[Case Report] 75 yo with a porcelain aorta
16 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A 75 year-old man with severe aortic stenosis is deemed unsuitable for surgery on the basis of a porcelain aorta detected with cross-sectional imaging...
Ep141: Space Medicine- Part 2
02 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The record for the longest space-flight is held by physician-cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov. Back in 1994-95, he spent 437 days on the Mir space station an...
Ep140: Space Medicine- Part 1
02 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 2027, NASA’s is planning to land astronauts on the moon for the first time in 53 years with the expectation that there will be a permanent base t...
[Case Report] 72yo with anterior uveitis
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A 72 year old female presents to an Adelaide emergency department with bilateral eye pain and redness lasting several days. She has a history of hyper...
Ep138: Amyloid busters- the benefit and the burden
08 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Australia has just approved a second amyloid-targeting therapy for patients with incipient Alzheimer’s dementia. Lecanemab (Leqembi) now joins donan...
[Case Report] 27yo with left limb weakness and a mediastinal mass
24 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A 27-year-old male wakes up with weakness in the left arm and leg and gets himself admitted at Royal Adelaide Hospital. Shockingly, for an otherwise w...
[IMJ On-Air] DKA and insulin infusion protocols
04 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Diabetic ketoacidosis can be life-threatening but there’s some variability in the way it’s managed between health settings. Intervention involves ...
Ep135: “Wherefore a Pomegranate?” and other classics from the last ten years
22 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Pomegranate Health has been streaming since June 2015, so we’re going to share a few more classic eps from the last ten years. First up, presenter M...
[IMJ On-Air] Microbleeds and Memory
04 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Cerebral microbleeds are a finding on MRI that are usually asymptomatic. There are two main aetiological pathways, one occurring as a result of uncont...
[Case Report] 46yo with psychosis and cold intolerance
24 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A 46-year old man is admitted to hospital following a first time presentation of psychosis that involved barricading himself inside a neighbour’s ho...
Ep132: Ten Years of Pomegranate Health
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 catalo...
Ep131: The semantics of CPR
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast we discuss low-value care that has emerged from a decay in the specificity of the terms “cardiac arrest” and “cardiopulmonary re...
Ep130: "The motherhood penalty"
29 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
[Case Report] 65yo with ST elevation during AF ablation procedure
20 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
ST elevation is clearly a worrying finding that can herald life-threatening conditions, such as ST elevation myocardial infarction. But not all ST-ele...
Ep128: Brushing off the cobwebs
30 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 o...
[Case Report] 74yo with dyspnoea after AF ablation
14 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we hear about an emergency presentation to a South Australian hospital, of a 74-year-old male with shortness of breath. The curve ball...
Ep126: Trying times for Māori medics
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 st...
[Case Report] 52yo with hand clumsiness after Chiari operation
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This case report comes to you from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a huge teaching hospital that serves the Harvard Medical School. The 52-y...
Ep124: Pleural medicine comes of age
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Gary Lee established the first dedicated pleural service in the southern hemisphere in 2009, at the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth. ...
[Case Report] 42yo male with fever following liver transplant
11 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This case report describes a 42-year-old male from Arizona with a complex course characterised by fever following an orthotopic liver transplant. A ge...
Ep122: Funding pan-cancer therapies
28 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the previous episode we heard how some rationally-designed therapies work on almost any cancer with the right molecular signature. Tumour-agnostic ...
Ep121: Precision oncology explained
16 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The genomic understanding of cancer has transformed a tissue-based classification model that had been dominant for 150 years or more. The last three d...
[Case Report] 35yo male with proximal weakness and skin changes
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This case report describes a 35-year-old Caucasian male presenting with 5 weeks of progressive weakness in the proximal limbs and trunk and associated...
[Case Report] 47yo with rapidly progressive respiratory failure requiring ECMO
20 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 2019 a man was referred to Royal Adelaide Hospital with worsening breathlessness and a productive cough. He was a 47 year old electrician with a hi...
[Journal Club] Thrombolysis up to 24hr after ischaemic stroke
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Thrombectomy for acute ischaemic stroke has undergone great advances in the last decade, but the expertise and technology is restricted to tertiary ho...
[Case Report] 48yo with diarrhoea and lymphadenopathy
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast follows the case of a 48-year-old male with a 3-month history of diarrhoea and associated lymphadenopathy. A complex constellation of sym...
[Guest Lecture] Fighting hepatitis C in prisons and the community
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This recording comes from the launch of the 2nd Monitoring and Evaluation Report on Hepatitis C Elimination in NSW. The work was conducted through the...
Ep115: One day as a nuclear medicine registrar
09 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Karan Singh loves his job as a registrar in nuclear medicine but he thinks there isn’t enough exposure to the specialty during medical school and...
[IMJ On-Air] Understanding readmissions better
22 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The LACE index is a prognostic algorithm for predicting the likelihood that a newly discharged patient will come back into hospital within 30 days bec...
[Case Report] 58yo with acute myeloid leukaemia and diplopia
09 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast follows the case of a 58 year old man who presented to the haematology department at Flinders Medical Centre with intravascular coagulati...
Ep112: The resilient workplace
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The RACP Congress in May this year was opened by a fascinating lecture on mental health in the medical workforce, which has been trimmed down for audi...
[CPD On Demand] Advance Your CPD Through Effective Supervision
16 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From 2024, supervising has been recognised as a Category 2 CPD activity. This short and insightful episode focuses on recent updates to the 2024 MyCPD...
[Case Report] 32yo with abdominal pain two years after pancreas-kidney transplant
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This case report has been developed by Trainees, to assist their peers with preparation of long-case presentations. It is not a fully-vetted Education...
Ep109: Cultivating a rural workforce
11 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Australia is a big continent and sparsely populated continent. 28 percent of Australians live in areas classified regional, rural or remote and their ...
[Case Report] 68yo with cardiometabolic risk factors and transient monocular vision loss
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Pomegranate [Case Report] is a Q&A style podcast developed by trainees, for trainees. In our debut episode, we hear about w a who man presented to...
[Journal Club] Baricitinib immune therapy for new onset type 1 diabetes
11 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Type 1 diabetes has a very high treatment burden in terms of direct costs, inconvenience and lost productivity for patients and their carers. Further,...
Ep106: The whiskey fix and the apple of Granada
25 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s guests are the hosts of This Medical Life, a wonderful podcast that delves into the archives of medical history. Dr Travis Brown describes t...
Ep105: When parents and paediatrics clash
26 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Last November an NHS Hospital Trust in Nottingham sought permission from the UK High Court to withdraw life support from a seven-month old girl called...
[IMJ On-Air] Is the jury still out on omega-3 supplementation?
30 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The theory that certain fatty acids are essential to the diet and associated with reduced cardiovascular risk has been controversial since it was floa...
[IMJ On-Air] HepatoCare: a model for palliative and supportive care in advanced cirrhosis
11 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Median survival for patients diagnosed with advanced cirrhosis is around 2 years and quality of life is poor. Fewer than a quarter of such patients re...
Ep102: Staying on script with semaglutide
13 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Semaglutide, branded as Ozempic or Wegovy, is an analogue of glucagon-like peptide 1 which has glucose-dependent effects on insulin secretion. In this...
Ep101: Setting the standard for workforce wellbeing
26 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve known for a decade that about 50 percent of doctors meet the criteria for burnout, and the figure is up to 70 percent among trainees. But orga...
Ep100: Conversations with ChatGPT
16 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This is the final episode in a five-part series about artificial intelligence in medicine. We start by weighing up the costs and benefits of automatio...
Ep99: When AI goes wrong
09 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This is the fourth part in a series on artificial intelligence in medicine and we try and unpick the causes and consequences of adverse events resulti...
[IMJ On-Air] A tiger in the mallee: Victoria’s JEV cluster
16 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On the 28th of January 2022 a 75-year-old man was admitted to the regional Albury Wodonga Health Service with a high fever and Parkinsonian symptoms. ...
Ep97: The governance of AI
05 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This is the third part of a series on artificial intelligence in medicine. Previously we explained how to train and test machine learning models that ...
Ep96: The ergonomics of AI
21 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The allure of having devices and tasks assisted by artificial intelligence is that they will help overcome some of the natural limits of human cogniti...
Ep95: Machine Learning 101
14 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
AI-assisted healthcare is reaching maturity in many applications and could alleviate some of the capacity gap increasingly faced by health systems . O...
Ep94: Facing up to racial bias
12 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In today’s podcast we try and understand the impact that racial bias makes on variation in clinical care. For example, racialized patterns in the us...
Ep93: The rise and fall of mpox
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The first time most of us heard of monkeypox was in May 2022. The smallpox-like infection appeared to spring from nowhere and make its way through Eur...
Ep92: Data-driven practice improvement
27 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Medical and administrative records are normally collected to help the management of patients or institutions, but it can be time consuming to extract ...
[IMJ On-Air] Hyperglycaemia and COVID-19
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a handful of international studies showed that there was increased risk of adverse outcomes in hospitalise...
[IMJ On-Air] High readmission rates in cirrhotic patients
21 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Hospitalisation rates for cirrhosis are increasing in Australia in part associated with the high prevalence of obesity and subsequent non-alcoholic fa...
[Guest Lecture] What we know about long COVID
14 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
ADAPT is a prospective cohort study that has been following up COVID-19 patients since the earliest days of the pandemic. It has allowed researchers t...
[IMJ On-Air] Making sense of HACs
16 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Clinical complications suffered by patients during hospital stays are assumed to be preventable and to provide some metric of quality of care. To assi...
[IMJ On-Air] Managing cannabinoid use in palliative care
25 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
About two thirds of Australians use complementary and alternative medicines but only around half of these people will mention it to their doctor. Pati...
[IMJ On-Air] Recent advances in asthma management
13 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This is the first episode of a new format called “IMJ On-Air” inspired by the RACP’s Internal Medicine Journal. Each episode will be have as gue...
Ep85: The ASD Odyssey- a reply
31 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The National Guideline for the Assessment and Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Australia aspires to streamline referral pathways so that chil...
Ep84: The ASD Odyssey
16 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The average age at which autism spectrum disorder is diagnosed four, though signs are often present well before that. Even where families and GPs may ...
Ep83: Loving Medicine Again
11 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the last episode we heard some powerful examples of the challenges faced by some practitioners in medicine. Every situation has its idiosyncrasies,...
Ep82: Coming back from Burnout— Congress 2022
21 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Not a day goes by that there isn’t a headline about the overstretched health service and the struggling professionals within it. It isn’t COVID th...
Ep81: Advocacy from the Top
03 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In episode 78 we heard from some physicians who found themselves taking up the role of advocate, not just for their own patients but for broader syste...
Ep80: Healthcare in a Volatile Climate
02 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The globe has already warmed by more than one degree Celsius over pre-industrial levels and is on track to exceed two degrees by the end of the centur...
Ep79: Melanoma vs the Double-Edged Sword
29 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Immune checkpoint inhibitors have revolutionised care for patients with advanced melanoma and other cancers. These days around half of patients with u...
Ep78: The Advocate’s Journey
02 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The core work of being a physician is demanding enough. But if you’re seeing patients come in day after day with ailments that have social determina...
Ep77: Deciding with Children
11 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is shared from the Essential Ethics podcast produced at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. It is presented by paediatric re...
Ep76: Making Amends- Medical Injury Part 3
07 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This is the third podcast in a series about medical injury. First we talked about what victims of injury want to hear from the health system after suc...
Ep75: Feeling Guilty- Medical Injury Part 2
09 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the last episode we talked about what patients or their families want to hear after a iatrogenic injury. Despite best practice standards for open d...
Ep74: Saying Sorry- Medical Injury Part 1
22 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Medical injury occurs at a rate of about 12 per cent of admissions, and errors without consequence at a higher rate still. According to Australian and...
Ep73: Communicating a Pandemic
23 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There are many layers of public health interventions that can reduce the rate of transmission of the novel coronavirus. Social distancing, mask wearin...
Ep72: Modelling a pandemic
15 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to public attention, like never before, the work of public health physicians as well as epidemiologists, statisticia...
Ep71: Voluntary Assisted Dying—what have we learned?
20 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 2017, Victoria was the first state in Australia to pass voluntary assisted legislation and has been followed by Western Australia, Tasmania and now...
Ep70: Zeroing in on “the renal troponin”
10 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Acute Kidney Injury makes a greater contribution to early mortality than acute myocardial infarction and it's been argued we should consider the ...
Ep69: Gendered Medicine—Funding and Research
15 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This is the third and final part of our series on gendered medicine. We step back and look at the way that health care and research are funded. It’s...
Ep68: Gendered Medicine—Pain
22 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Gender can be considered a social determinant of health, in the different pressures and expectations it puts on women and men. For example, the taboos...
Ep67: Boosting Public Health in the Indo-Pacific
31 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This is the fourth and final part in our series on Global Health Security. Australia’s Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security was launched in 2017 ...
Ep66: Gendered Medicine—Heart Disease
17 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We traditionally think of cardiovascular disease as a man’s problem, but it’s the leading cause of death for women as well as men in most of the i...
Ep65: A New Script for Global Public Health
12 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we present some provocative solutions to problems presented in the previous two stories.We heard about pharmaceutical patents, and how...
Ep64: Big Pharma and the People’s Vaccine
03 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This is part 2 in our series on global public health and focuses on the impact of intellectual property laws on the development and distribution of ph...
Ep63: the WHO’s Biggest Test
06 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Ep62: Essential Ethics in Adolescent Health
11 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In episode 59 we shared a sampler of the Essential Ethics podcast from the Children's Bioethics Centre, at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbo...
Ep61: Delirium Part 2- Prevention and Management
09 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the previous episode we discussed the presentations and screening of delirium, as well as the risk factors. Just as important as these medical and ...
Ep60: Delirium Part 1- Detection and Causes
08 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Delirium is associated with an increased risk of falls, dementia and high dependency care, and all of this adds up to higher mortality. About a third ...
Ep59: Essential Ethics in Paediatrics
15 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The ethical questions that come up in paediatrics can appear overwhelming to begin with. When can a child be said to have cognitive capacity and bodil...
Ep58: Billing Part 2—Compliance and the Free Market
11 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we continue the discussion from Episode 56 about medical billing in Australia. Almost 500 million Medicare rebates are processed eve...
Ep57: The Art of Telehealth
23 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
COVID-19 has left few people around the world unaffected, and health practitioners are among those at the top of the list. Their daily and intimate se...
Ep56: Billing in Byzantium
11 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Australia has one of the best value health systems in the world, but also some of the most Byzantine health regulation. Between the federal Medicare s...
Ep55: Starting out in Private Practice
05 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast is about one of many pathways in medicine; private practice. It’s a pathway that presents many opportunities, but also personal and fin...
Ep54: My Health Record in Practice
09 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How many times have you thought “things would be so much more efficient if we had shared electronic health records?” Australia, now has the My H...
Ep53: Marrabinya—a hand outstretched
12 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Marrabinya is a Wiradjuri word meaning “hand outstretched.” It’s the name of a service in the Western New South Wales Primary Health Network whi...
Ep52: Opioids Part 2- Regulation and Marketing
16 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the previous episode we talked about the science of pain, opioid analgesia and dependence. Now we look at the influence of culture, regulation and ...
Ep51: Getting off the Opioids- Part 1
04 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The dramatic headlines about the opioid crisis are all-too familiar by now. Australia and New Zealand have followed the lead of the US, and seen a fou...
Ep50: Rural Medicine in Aotearoa—Congress 2019
21 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
New Zealand doesn't have the same extremes of remoteness of Australia, but it does have a rugged landscape that results in small and scattered co...
Ep49: Training in the Bush Part 2—Remote WA
11 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A third of Australia's population is classified as regional or remote, but as it's such a big place it's hard to provide comprehensive ...
Ep48: Training in the Bush Part 1—Country NSW
03 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A third of Australia's population is classified as regional or remote, but since it's such a big place it's hard to provide comprehensi...