Marjorie Shephard

✡️♿⚽ Socialist, feminist, Jewish, disabled mother, grandma and Spurs fan. COYS! She/her.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. A 42-year-old mother of two came to my office complaining of jaw pain and crushing fatigue. She ran half-marathons. Her EKG was normal. Another doctor had sent her home with anxiety medication.
When I got her into the cath lab, I found severe microvascular disease — plaque choking the tiniest vessels of her heart, the ones standard angiograms routinely miss.
Her heart had been starving in silence while everyone told her she was stressed.
She is alive today. Too many women like her are not.
Heart disease kills more women than every cancer combined. And medicine is still diagnosing it through a male lens.
84% of cardiologists report having patients in the past year whose heart disease was misdiagnosed by another physician. Women with a STEMI heart attack have a 59% greater chance of being misdiagnosed compared to men. Women with an NSTEMI — 41% greater chance.
The reason is structural. For decades, we screened, tested, and treated women using a template built for men.
Men's heart attacks announce themselves — the crushing chest pain, the clutched fist, the Hollywood collapse. Women's hearts whisper. Crushing fatigue that feels like wearing a lead vest. Jaw pain written off as TMJ. Nausea blamed on a stomach bug. An ache between the shoulder blades blamed on a long week. Shortness of breath blamed on being out of shape.
For years, medicine called these "atypical" symptoms. They are not atypical. They are female-typical. Half of humanity is not a variant.
And the biology runs deeper than symptoms.
Women have smaller hearts and narrower coronary arteries. Plaque doesn't only clog the big highway vessels — it hides in the microvasculature, the tiny branches feeding the heart muscle itself. A woman can have a heart attack with a completely "clean" standard angiogram.
SCAD — spontaneous coronary artery dissection — occurs 90% of the time in women. Often young, fit women with zero traditional risk factors. It's the leading cause of heart attack in women under 50, accounting for roughly one quarter of all cases in that age group. Most doctors have never diagnosed one.
And some of the most dangerous cardiac risk factors are hidden in women's medical histories where no one thinks to look:
Preeclampsia or gestational hypertension doubles to quadruples lifetime heart disease and stroke risk. Pregnancy is the body's first cardiac stress test — and these complications are early warning sirens, not closed chapters.
Autoimmune disease — lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis — far more common in women, turbocharges inflammation and plaque formation at any age.
Cardiovascular disease in women aged 20-44 is projected to surge nearly 50% by 2050.
The youngest patients in my practice keep getting younger.
What every woman should ask her doctor — and what every doctor should be asking:
"Given my pregnancy history, autoimmune status, and family history — what is my full cardiovascular risk?" If they don't ask about preeclampsia or gestational diabetes, volunteer it.
"Should I have an Lp(a) test and a coronary calcium score?" Standard cholesterol panels miss too much. Lp(a) is genetic, one-time, and most women have never been tested.
"My tests came back normal but my symptoms haven't stopped — what's next?" Normal stress tests and angiograms can miss microvascular disease, spasm, and SCAD. Persistent symptoms warrant coronary CT angiography or cardiac MRI.
And if something feels wrong — say these exact words to your doctor: "I am concerned this could be my heart."
That single sentence changes the workup. Do not soften it. Do not apologize for it.
80% of heart disease is preventable. But the playbook has to be built for female biology.
Two decades ago, I wrote one of the first books warning that heart disease was the number one killer of women and that medicine was diagnosing it through a male lens. It was recognized by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House during the early years of the national conversation about women's heart health.
I'm haunted by how much of that book I could republish today unchanged.
The science has advanced. The awareness has grown. But the gap between what we know and what happens in the exam room is still costing women their lives.
Share this with every woman you love — and every doctor who treats them. READ MORE: https://t.co/4LRugiY8q2

[Dr Jay Watts @Shrink_at_Large]

One of the grimmest political tricks of the last 15 years has been convincing the public that disabled people are a bigger economic threat than tax avoidance, private outsourcing failures, or housing costs.

[Trussell @TrussellUK]

Every person deserves:

food
housing
healthcare
stable secure job

[Your Party @thisisyourparty]

"The lesson is this: eventually, the rich, the famous, the oligarchs, and the entirely self-entitled do eventually fall."

—Jeremy Corbyn on Mandelson, Epstein and Andrew.

https://t.co/7huvrykZ6q

[Marjorie Shephard @MarjorieShepha1]

This list is informative and fascinating and terrifying. Read and share.

[tern @1goodtern]

https://t.co/dUdXvbrUnE

[Anas Ahmed @AnasFTL]

So in one night we’ve seen a player getting booked for a foul in the penalty area without conceding a penalty and another player charging into Djed Spence using his elbow, breaking his jaw, without being sent off.

Just your average officiating in a game against Spurs.

Completely normal stuff.

[Match of the Day @BBCMOTD]

Son Heung-min is still a big Tottenham fan 🤍

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Vaccine Anti vaccine
research research

[Dr. Sean Mullen @drseanmullen]

There are now more than half a million scientific publications related to COVID-19 and a rapidly growing body of evidence linking SARS-CoV-2 infection to immune dysregulation, microvascular injury, autonomic dysfunction, clotting abnormalities, viral persistence, and measurable cognitive changes.

And to the people constantly sick, exhausted, dizzy, forgetful, exercise intolerant, waking up to feeling like you got hit by a truck on the daily or suddenly developing strange inflammation, heart issues, GI problems, or “mystery” symptoms after repeated infections…

At some point you and society as a whole must confront the reality that repeated infection with a vascular and neurotropic virus was never as harmless as everyone wanted it to be.

I choose to live in reality.

That virus is still here. It is still spreading through the air. And it is still associated with long-term vascular, immune, and neurological consequences for many people.

Protecting yourself from that threat — through cleaner air, better ventilation, filtration, vaccination, and high-quality masks in high-risk settings — also reduces your risk from many of the other respiratory pathogens constantly circulating around us.

And if you are tired of watching people suffer while being told this is “normal,” then start demanding urgency.

Ask why Long Covid clinics are closing instead of expanding.
Ask why immunologists, virologists, neurologists, vascular scientists, and pathologists are not being funded at Manhattan Project scale to investigate viral persistence, immune dysfunction, clotting, mitochondrial damage, and cognitive impairment.
Ask why billions can appear overnight for almost anything else, but millions living with chronic illness are told to “pace themselves” and move on.

Support researchers (the ones who are still focused on Long Covid that don’t conflate the disease)
Support clean air initiatives (two strong efforts happening in Illinois right now! Help us!!).
Support disability advocacy.
Pressure institutions to improve indoor air quality.
Stop mocking people for protecting themselves.
And stop accepting “everyone is sick all the time now” as a normal feature of modern life.

[The Spurs Web @thespursweb]

Spotted outside the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium

[Marjorie Shephard @MarjorieShepha1]

What a great guy! Really miss him

[Not Match of the Day @NOT_MOTD]

Heung-Min Son: "In a cruel world, always choose to be kind." ❤️ https://t.co/kvAuTMXA4l

[Marjorie Shephard @MarjorieShepha1]

It's the system not the individual.

[Your Party @thisisyourparty]

It's not just Starmer that needs to go.

It's permanent austerity. It's privatisation. It's a political system rigged for the profiteers, not the people.

It's the entire rotten Westminster establishment.

[tern @1goodtern]

Don't ever forget that your government upgraded the air filtration in its main government buildings during an airborne pandemic, but not the hospital you attend or your mum's care home or your kids' daycare or prisons or shelters.

[Diane Abbott @HackneyAbbott]

There is a myth, very widely held in Labour, that we achieved an huge popular victory in 2024 under Starmer.
In fact we won 9.7 million votes, over 3 million fewer than in 2017 and half a million less than the 'disastrous' 2019 poll.
We won because the Tories imploded in 2024.

[Diane Abbott @HackneyAbbott]

Once again, Tony Blair is wrong and advocates to make ordinary people worse off.
Britain has one of the lowest effective state pension entitlements in the whole of Europe.

Tony Blair's thinktank urges scrapping of state pension triple-lock
https://t.co/ipQ9PuGNUl

[Cat in the Hat 🐈‍⬛ 🎩 🇬🇧 @_CatintheHat]

Officials at @WHO have quietly deleted tweets saying Covid is “not airborne” over the years.

On the one hand, that’s a good thing because Covid definitively *is* airborne…

…but it’s frustrating that there’s no public apology or acknowledgement of the years of misinformation.

[Tomás Ó Crohan @FD1959Jan]

@jeremycorbyn @SocialistVoice

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Peter Mandelson worked every day to try and prevent a redistribution of wealth and power in Britain.

That is why he was rewarded with a top job.

Our political system is built by - and for - a corrupt clique. We will carry on campaigning for a society that works for us all.

[Marjorie Shephard @MarjorieShepha1]

Proven correct yet again.

I’ll always remember the mistruths peddled by the BBC about the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn in particular. The vast majority of people in this country have paid a big price for trusting the media.

So tempted to say “I told you so” to the doubters.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

In 2019, I warned that the NHS was being sold off to private U.S companies.

The media's response? I was peddling Russian propaganda.

One of those companies is Palantir, a company that has enabled genocide in Gaza. We were right then — and we are right now: Kick Palantir out.

[Marjorie Shephard @MarjorieShepha1]

These lessons must be learned.

[Supporting Healthcare Heroes UK @SupportingHH_UK]

The Covid Inquiry is clear: IPC guidance failed.
Five key mistakes led to avoidable harm for healthcare workers and patients.

We cannot afford to ignore this. Read the paper by @EvonneTCurran and our chair @alitwy
👉 https://t.co/RpzQGzTAvf

#SafeAir4All