[imagesource:prenuvo]

In recent months, images of celebrities and influencers posing in branded scrubs in front of a glossy, cylindrical M.R.I. machine have begun to pop up on social media with notable frequency.

One of the celebrity-endorsed companies cashing in on this fad is Prenuvo, who claims they can revolutionise preventive health care by ‘predicting your future’ at $2 499 (R48 000) a pop.

But experts warn this might not be the right approach.

According to the company’s founder and chief executive, Andrew Lacy, Prenuvo does not pay anyone to promote its products, but it does offer free scans to influencers and prominent figures in the wellness industry “in exchange for an honest review if they feel like it,” he said.

Kim Kardashian, however, looked very humble in slippers in the post she shared with her 364 million followers last month, writing in the caption that “Prenuvo has really saved some of my friends lives.”

 

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A post shared by Kim Kardashian (@kimkardashian)

The company does indeed seek out the glamorous crowds.

During New York Fashion Week in early September, it coordinated with the fashion public relations agency Lucien Pagès to set up appointments for “a few” influential people in the fashion world, according to the agency.

They included the French fashion editor Olivier Zahm, who wrote on Instagram on Wednesday that he went to get his scan between runway shows. Designer Zac Posen, model Lily Aldridge and Vogue editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson have also posted about the scans.

Sharing post-mammogram photos or promoting dubious procedures like colonics and IV drips has always been a great way for celebrities to show how ‘human’ they are, so body scans — complete with nearly identical photo ops — have taken the celebrity health endorsement to new heights in terms of cost.

Because staying healthy and beautiful is easier when you’re rich.

High-profile proponents have made Prenuvo perhaps the most prominent in a crop of companies offering whole-body scans that are generally not covered by insurance. There’s also Ezra, simonONE and the Stockholm-based Neko Health.

“It’s completely understandable why you’d want to find cancer early,” said Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman, director of the Radiology Outcomes Research Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. “It would absolutely give you that sense of control over it.”

Medical experts however think this is another ‘trend’, like steaming your yoni.

The American College of Radiology released a statement saying that there was “no documented evidence that total body screening is cost-efficient or effective in prolonging life,” and expressing concern that scans could lead to “nonspecific findings” that require extensive, expensive follow-up.

In other words, the scans might just be the carrot that keeps people coming back – which is fine for celebs, but when normal people start opening their wallets, it could lead to more problems down the line. After all, if your doc notes ‘This looks concerning’, you might as well start selling your house for the ‘exploratory’ mission that follows.

Dr. Larry Norton, a breast oncologist and the medical director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said that “there’s just no evidence to support” healthy people undergoing full-body M.R.I. screening, even for people who have a family history of cancer.

A 2019 meta-analysis looked at 12 studies encompassing over 5,000 people who did not have any symptoms of diseases like cancer but had undergone whole-body M.R.I. scans. Among the six studies that had complete data, the researchers found that 16 percent of people who were scanned ended up having false positives.

“If you scan more, we see more,” said Dr. Thomas C. Kwee, a radiologist at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands and an author on the meta-analysis.

“You wonder, is this really good that you’re doing for the patient?” Dr. Kwee said.

Our bodies commonly contain abnormalities, like lumps and masses and scars on organs, that can be detected by M.R.I. Dr. Smith-Bindman compared these to moles on our skin. An M.R.I. alone can’t always tell you whether a finding is benign or troubling, and patients often have to undergo additional testing. Ka-ching.

According to Dr. Smith-Bindman, “the problem has nothing to do with the technology.”

“The problem has to do with the profound, normal variation in our bodies,” she said, and the likelihood of nodules and abnormalities that a very sensitive machine will find.

Dr. Pignone said he worried about what he called the “opportunity cost” — the effort people invest in follow-up imaging for M.R.I. findings, instead of in following the recommended schedule for health screenings or focusing on other facets of preventive medicine.

So while it’s fine for Kim K and other celebs to get free scans because they’re beautiful, the procedures might just be a Pandora’s Box for normies. As my gran was fond of saying: If you look for trouble, you’ll find it.

Especially if the company that makes money from that trouble does the searching.

[source:nytimes]