Health coverage online ranges from rigorous medical-journal reporting to clickbait wellness content, often on the same homepage. WeSearch's health hub focuses on the rigorous end — medical-press reporting plus serious public-health journalism — and excludes wellness content that doesn't reference primary research.
What's in this hub
Medical press. Stat News, BMJ, the Lancet (editorial), JAMA Network (editorial), Nature Medicine, Science Translational Medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine (editorial), Clinical Trials Update.
Public-health journalism. Kaiser Health News, Health Affairs, ProPublica Health, the Atlantic Health, the New Yorker Health, Reuters Health, NPR Health, NYT Well, Washington Post Health.
Pandemic and infectious disease. CIDRAP, Helen Branswell at Stat, ProMED, ECDC, CDC.
Mental health. Mental Floss Health, Stat Mental Health, BMJ Mental Health, BMJ Open Mental Health.
Health policy. KFF, Health Affairs, the Hill Health, Politico Health, Bloomberg Health.
What you'll find here
- Major paper coverage (with primary-source links)
- FDA approvals and regulatory news
- Public-health policy and pandemic response
- Hospital and provider news
- Drug pricing and access reporting
- Mental-health beat reporting
- Investigative health journalism
What you won't find here
Wellness content that doesn't reference primary research. Diet and supplement marketing. Crystal-healing wellness. Anti-vaccine content (we hide it under our editorial standards as factually unsupported public-health misinformation, and we'd rather have a smaller hub with a higher bar than a wider hub with bad-faith content).
How to use the health hub well
- Click through to the original study. Health journalism is full of "small study suggests..." headlines that overrepresent preliminary findings. The abstract usually clarifies sample size and effect size in ways the headline doesn't.
- Cross-reference with the science hub. Many health stories are basic-science findings filtered into clinical implications. The science hub often has the original-research framing.
- Subscribe to push by topic. Settings → Notifications → Watches → Keywords. Examples: "Alzheimer", "obesity", "antibiotic resistance", "long covid".
- Use comment threads carefully. Working clinicians and researchers sometimes post substantive context; lay opinions on health questions are not always reliable. Cite primary sources when in doubt.
What we're working on adding
Better international public-health coverage (we're stronger on US and UK health press than on coverage from the Global South). Better mental-health-specific coverage. Better preprint-aware coverage as preprint use accelerates.
Why health journalism is hard to read
The structural problem with health coverage in mainstream press is the chronic mismatch between scientific findings and the headline incentive. A small observational study with a 5% effect size makes a more clickable headline if it overturns conventional medical wisdom; the rest of the medical literature, which usually fails to replicate the small study, makes a less clickable follow-up. Most readers see the overturning headlines and miss the slow walk-back, which produces a steady drift in which "studies show" becomes increasingly unreliable as a shorthand. Add to this the financial conflicts of interest that pervade pharmaceutical and supplement coverage, and you have a beat where reading well requires more skepticism than most other beats.
The hub helps by mixing the rigor-friendly publishers (Stat News, BMJ, Kaiser Health News, Helen Branswell's beat reporting at Stat) with the generalist health desks. The rigor-friendly coverage is usually slower; reading it alongside the headline-driven coverage helps calibrate.
Bottom line: who should read this hub
- If you work in clinical medicine or public health → Stat News and BMJ daily; the hub catches what they cover plus generalist framings.
- If you have a chronic condition and want to follow research in your area → keyword push for your condition is the cleanest workflow.
- If you cover health professionally as a journalist or comms person → cross-publisher reading is the standard habit.
- If you're a parent or patient navigating a health decision → use the hub to find primary-research coverage; the abstract of the actual paper is more reliable than the press release.
- If you want general health-and-wellness content → this hub isn't the right place; the editorial bar excludes most wellness content.
Frequently asked
Are diet and supplement stories included?
Only when they reference primary peer-reviewed research. Most diet-and-supplement headlines we see don't meet that bar and aren't included.
How are anti-vaccine stories handled?
Hidden under our editorial standards as factually unsupported public-health misinformation. The bar for inclusion is original peer-reviewed research or rigorous public-health journalism.
Does the hub cover mental health well?
Improving but still thinner than ideal. Stat Mental Health, BMJ Mental Health, and the dedicated mental-health desks at NYT and the Atlantic are the main sources.