This Medical Life

Charles Dicken’s first novel has an adolescent boy named Joe who was overweight and always sleepy. He could fall asleep at any time, even during meals. The novel is known as the Pickwick Papers. Decades later, doctors began to recognise patients with the same symptoms. They called it Pickwickian syndrome.

Obstructive sleep apnoea is a common condition in the general community. Risk factors include being overweight, male, and over the age of 50. The difficulty for patients is they may not be aware they suffer from this condition unless a partner tells them they stop breathing during sleep. Fortunately, we have a number of treatment options available for patients who suffer from sleep apnoea.

This is the story of sleep apnoea.

Our special guests:

Dr Saul Gilbert is the managing director of a sleep clinic called The Oasis in Adelaide with 25 years research and clinical experience in sleep psychophysiology.

Dr Anuk Kruavit is a respiratory, sleep and general medicine physician with an interest in obstructive sleep apnoea and complex respiratory sleep disorders.

Listen:

Willem J Kolff was an intern when he saw a 22 year old man die of kidney failure. He realised that the patient’s life could have been saved if his blood could have been detoxified. Willem set to work and developed the first ever dialysis machine (initially the ‘rotating drum kidney’).

While dialysis is a lifesaving treatment, it is one that we hope to avoid for patients. In this episode, we discuss two topics that are the largest contributors to chronic kidney disease: Diabetes, and Hypertension.

This is the story of Chronic Kidney Disease (Part 2).

Our special guest:

Dr Richard Phoon who is the Senior Medical Advisor at Westmead Hospital and has worked full-time as a Nephrologist at Westmead and Blacktown Hospitals since 2007.

Useful links:

One in 10 Australians over the age of 18 years are living with signs of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) with the number of patients needing treatment for kidney failure has doubled in the last 20 years. Early detection and intervention can slow the progression of CKD by up to 15 years or longer.

Our understanding of kidney disease can be traced back to Dr Richard Bright, one of the founding fathers of nephrology. He noted that heating a patient’s urine with kidney disease could form a precipitate – nowadays we’d call this albuminuria (albumin in the urine) and it is a marker of kidney damage.

Today, there are a range of conditions that can reduce kidney function, cause kidney damage, and can cause significant morbidity and early mortality in patients. By screening patients, we can reduce the progression of CKD and significantly affect the health of patients in the long term.

This is the story of Chronic Kidney Disease (Part 1).

Our special guests:

Maddie Williams who is a Registered Nurse with Kidney Health Australia who was diagnosed with kidney disease at the age of 17 requiring haemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis, and received a renal transplant.

Dr Richard Phoon who is the Senior Medical Advisor at Westmead Hospital and has worked full-time as a Nephrologist at Westmead and Blacktown Hospitals since 2007.

Useful links:

The statistics of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and Domestic Violence prevalence are staggering. 1 in 6 adult women and 1 in 16 adult men have experience physical or sexual abuse at the hands of their partner. Approximately 2.5 million Australians (13%) experienced abuse during their childhood. However, IPV is a topic that is rarely discussed. As healthcare professionals, we need to change this.