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Next up, how about some simple ways to keep up with medical and scientific news!

I have always found this to be a relatively overwhelming task — so much news, so many sources, so little time!! Below are a few resources I use to keep up with some of the latest in scientific and medical news.

MedPage Today and MedScape

These are two separate resources but they are very similar to one another. Both give insight into recent updates in the medical field. You’ll find here articles outlining recent published papers or research studies and their findings as well as health policy news in the United States.

Both also provide email newsletters as well as a mobile App and website. You can sign up with these resources either through their websites (here are some links: MedPage Today and MedScape) or their Apps!

AAAS Newsletters

The AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) is the organization that brought us the journal Science. Though their updates are mostly for the broader scientific community, touching on topics across the research spectrum (from astrophysics to biomedical research to evolutionary biology), I really like their newsletters — they’re a super simple way to keep abreast of major science updates.

The email newsletters link out to articles about recent papers and findings published in Science and elsewhere. Some newsletters also contain links directly to the papers themselves, but at this juncture, you’ll be faced with an access issue if you or your institution are not subscribed to the journals that house these papers. Nevertheless, their newsletters are still great sources of some really interesting finds!

To sign up for these emails, simply visit this page, select which updates you are interested in, and enter your email at the bottom!

AACOM Newsletters

Yup, beyond providing information on the Osteopathic medical community, the AACOM is also a pretty good source of headlines. If you are registered with them, you will receive email newsletters on important health policy updates from the AACOM Office of Government Relations, especially as they relate to or impact medical education issues. I have found this resource very helpful in keeping up with some of the changes occurring in the US’ current healthcare climate and understanding how they might impact me as a future medical student and practitioner.

It should be noted that you do not have to begin a DO application to do register with AACOM — AACOM and AACOMAS (the AACOM Application Service) are separate entities 🙂 You can register with AACOM by visiting their site, hitting “Login” at the top right corner of the page, and clicking the “New User” link underneath the login credential prompt.

Read by QxMD App/Site

Read is a mobile App and website that functions basically as an “aggregation” tool — you can search for articles and papers, create “collections” based on interests and keywords that you list out in your user profile, or follow other users’ collections. In all honesty, the App’s user interface (UI) takes some getting used to, but if you give it a chance, it can be a pretty neat way to flag, organize, and access research papers and articles published in your areas of interest.

One (pretty big) caveat, again, is that many of these papers exist behind paywalls, so unless you or your institution are subscribers to the journals in which these papers are published, you will likely be stuck reading just the abstracts.

If you’d like to explore this tool before signing up, they let you do that here!

KevinMD Blog

This is a blog that might be familiar to you already! It is actually a subsidiary of MedPage Today and is mostly comprised of editorial-type pieces, which offer some nice insight into specific schools of thought or personal opinions of medical professionals. You can sign up for email updates by visiting the blog and filling in the Subscribe box at the top of the righthand column.

Social Media

Another way to keep up with medical and scientific updates is social media. Admittedly, this is not my favorite method, since I’m kind of a Twitter novice and I don’t visit Facebook often. Nevertheless, for quick bytes of information while you’re on a short commute or waiting for an elevator, I find following some sources on Twitter to be convenient.

For the most part, I follow news sources (like NYT Science/NYT Health, BBC Health News, NPR Health News), as well as some journals and science magazines (such as Nature, Scientific American), and established health/medicine/research organizations (like the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization). Some accounts are more active than others, and given that Twitter’s algorithms tend to favor more prolific posters, sometimes updates from these organizations can get buried in the noise. All that said, if you’re scrolling through Twitter, it’s nice to have these types of updates shuffled in 🙂

Alrighty, as lengthy as this post may be, of course these are only some of the available means to keep up with news and updates — the full list is probably actually limitless, between Google alerts, RSS feeds, direct journal subscriptions, and loads of news outlets. In any case, I hope you found these tidbits helpful! As always, feel free to share any additional suggestions/thoughts below or through the Contact page!