A couple of highlights from around the web that made it into our feeds this week.
Why Are My Hands and Feet So Cold?
A simple, everyday question, “Why am I always freezing?” opens into something both practical and surprisingly reassuring. With help from vascular surgeons and other specialists (including our own Dr. Nicholas Morrissey), the article demystifies why fingers and toes are the first to surrender to winter air, and when a chill is just physiology doing its job versus a sign of something deeper, like Raynaud’s, anemia, peripheral artery disease (PAD), or hypothyroidism. It’s full of smart, usable advice and reminds us that sometimes the body’s quirks are simply its own way of keeping us alive. (from nytimes.com)
Female Cardiothoracic Surgeons, Unlocking the Male Fortress
This reporting from the Women in Thoracic Surgery conference is both bracing and deeply hopeful. It’s a portrait of a field still shaped by gatekeeping, inequity, and loneliness, but also by grit, mentorship, and a rising cohort determined to remake the culture from the inside. Through the voices of surgeons across generations, the story captures what it means to operate in one of medicine’s most demanding specialties while also navigating bias, pay gaps, and the emotional weight of being “the only one in the room.” Both an intimate look at the quiet revolutions happening in conference halls and ORs alike, at the women who keep pushing into spaces where they were never invited but always belonged. (from nytimes.com)
CDC Panel Recommends Delaying Birth Dose of Hepatitis B Vaccine
In a move widely criticized by medical and infectious-disease experts, a reconstituted CDC advisory panel voted to roll back the 30-year-old recommendation that all newborns receive a hepatitis B vaccine at birth, the policy credited with nearly eliminating infant infections in the U.S. Their proposal, which still needs approval from CDC leadership, suggests families “discuss” vaccination and delay the first dose until two months of age, despite no new safety concerns and strong evidence that newborn vaccination prevents chronic infection, liver cancer, and death. Modeling suggests the delay could lead to more than 1,400 additional chronic infections in the first year alone. It’s a sobering snapshot of how politicized vaccine policy is reshaping public health, and a reminder of why we must continue to champion rigorous evidence, universal vaccination, and the systems that keep children safe. (from statnews.com)
Now for some fiction that provides a rather haunting counterpoint to this week’s readings.
An Open Heart
A son tries to make sense of his father’s heart surgery, and what unravels is memory, war, guilt, myth, trauma, and tenderness braided into a single breathless sentence. Jamil Jan Kochai’s flash fiction moves between the clinical and the surreal, scar tissue and history, asking what we inherit, what we survive, and what we can’t outrun. (from newyorker.com)
Related:
- What We're Reading: 11/07/25
- Predatory Artery Treatment for PAD: A Vascular Surgeon Weighs In
- One Gift, Three Futures: Inside the 15-Hour Dance of the First Living-Donor Domino Split-Liver Transplant in Adults