Looking for an excellent, wide-ranging medical blog/newsletter

March 9, 2021 2:25 PM

I love reading The Prepared -- a great manufacturing and engineering-focused email newsletter with lots of fascinating links to articles, videos, and other content across an extremely broad range of topics. I'm hoping to find a similar newsletter (or blog / link aggregator) but with a broad medical/human health focus (or perhaps life science generally). Any recommendations?

Random sampling of the kind of stuff I'd love to see in my dream medical newsletter:

- adaptive engineering at home for a disability
- immunology papers on COVID and long COVID
- 3-D printing for growing ear tissue scaffolds for microtia
- lead poisoning / asthma / environmental health
- social determinants of health
- the logistics of organ transplantation
- the microbiome of the built environment
- decompression physiology and gas physiology
- the Global Microbiome Conservancy

posted by cnidaria to Science & Nature (7 answers total)

Response by poster: P.S. I'm not opposed to a podcast, but I'd particularly love to find a newsletter / aggregation of interesting links. (I already listen to Sawbones, the Undifferentiated Medical Student, This Podcast Will Kill You, New Scientist Weekly, and Cautionary Tales -- the last one is more accident-analysis focused but still up a similar alley IMO.)
posted by cnidaria at 2:28 PM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

STAT - Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine

posted by yclipse at 4:47 PM on March 9, 2021 [4 favorites]

STAT also offers newsletters.
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:51 PM on March 9, 2021

Science-based Medicine is more about busting pseudo-medicine (and laugh at their attempt to fool the public with names like "integrative" or "holistic", but it has good references.
posted by kschang at 5:00 PM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Best answer: STAT is good for headlines but the articles are generally not written by medical professionals and there have been a few cases where the writers have added something false or not explained something correctly.

Examples: in an article about pulse oximetry having a high error rate in darker-skinned patients they claimed that it measures the oxygen your body naturally produces. Bodies do not naturally produce oxygen, that is why we breathe.
They’ve also made some warnings about COVID vaccine allergies that almost stopped my mom from getting it until I convinced her to call an actual allergist.
So it’s fine for your purposes probably but a grain of salt on the actual content is called for.
posted by shesdeadimalive at 5:33 AM on March 10, 2021

Best answer: Nthing STAT, but also Medscape, Healio, NPR's Shots, HealthDay (which is syndicated in tons of other places), and Kaiser Health News (also widely syndicated) spring to mind. All are primarily sites, but all have at least one newsletter you can sign up for.
posted by quatsch at 11:11 AM on March 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

If you're at all interested in the political side of health care, I've really been enjoying the new email newsletter from the leftist doctor and public intellectual Abdul El-Sayed. It's called The Incision.
posted by zeusianfog at 1:17 PM on March 10, 2021