Medicine Is a Battlefield. Here's How to Stay in the Know

It's been said science is a full contact sport. And no branch gets rowdier in a political sense than health care.
Supporters of the Afforable Care Act rally outside the US Supreme Court in Washington DC on June 25 2015.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Science, it's been said, is a full-contact sport. Even when it doesn't reach the Supreme Court—from whence a crucial decision upholding Obamacare rumbled forth late last week—health care is constantly tangled up with policy.

And that war in medicine is long tenured. The road to basic research is a gauntlet. Translational medicine is in a mosh pit of competing interests. Clinical trials shift end points like a juking boxer. And if you're following these streams you won't miss a moment of the action.

Read the Eye on the FDA blog Do you really, really, really, really, really like reading about the FDA? You won't be able to look away from Eye on the FDA. The author is a pharmaceutical lawyer, so he's not the most unbiased source, but his takes are fair and his insights invaluable. Like his awesome piece on how apps like Periscope could affect pharmaceutical advertising. Or when he pointed out that the FDA had clandestinely changed its policy on blood donations from gay men. Even his weekly updates are gold mines of FDA scuttlebutt.

Follow Medical Skeptic on Twitter
Even though he hasn't written a blog post in over two years, MedSkep still has one of the keenest eyes in health care. He doesn't cover policy specifically, but his tweets are always on point with what's important in medical news right now.

Read the Brookings Institute's Health 360 blog
Health 360 is a bowl of health policy as perfect as little, small, wee bear's porridge. Smart but not wonkish, fun but not dumb. Plus it casts a wide net, looking at health policy implications that affect society, economics, and what's happening in lab. Their coverage of the Supreme Court's ACA ruling has been awesome, ranging from the decision's effects on the business of health, to in-depth analysis of Justices Scalia and Roberts' differences of opinion.

Read An Ounce of Evidence blog
Ashish Jha—practicing doctor and health policy professor at Harvard—offers policy analysis with a side of scientific methodology. As his blog title implies, a thousand pounds of opinion matter far less than an ounce of data. His posts often begin esoteric—his latest looks at how well a little-discussed part of the Affordable Care Act is changing patient readmission rates—but soon broaden into insightful (and empirically backed) takeaways.

Read Penn Science Policy Research
Written primarily by working scientists, the Penn Science Policy Blog looks at how policy affects lab life. Nominally covering all sciences, more often than not the posts skew towards the biosciences. Like this survey of all the reasons why it's so damn hard for biomedical postdocs to get tenured. Look at that bibliography! I bet your former favorite blog didn't hook you up with lit reviews like that. And they don't just chronicle the bioscience struggle. Bloggers write reviews of the conferences you missed, the studies you skipped, the punditry you passed on.