Will a Full-Body MRI Scan Help You or Hurt You? (NewYorker)

Can anyone here share their experiences with Full-body MRI scans?

Companies like Prenuvo and Ezra will use magnetic resonance imaging to reveal what’s inside you—for a price.

Prenuvo now has nine locations, with plans to open a dozen more; some employers offer free MRI scans as staff perks. The company also has several competitors—most notably Ezra, a New York-based startup that has raised more than twenty-two million dollars. Ezra offers full-body MRIs at prices ranging from a thousand three hundred and fifty dollars to twenty-five hundred dollars, and five-year memberships for seven thousand.

Prenuvo was founded by a man who, like Crownholm, launched companies for a living and was happy to pay a premium for health care. In 2018, Andrew Lacy, a serial tech entrepreneur with an M.B.A. from Stanford, flew to Vancouver to get a whole-body scan from Rajpaul Attariwala, a Canadian radiologist who had purchased his own MRI machine for use on a selective clientele in his private office. (MRI machines typically cost between one and three million dollars.) Lacy later said that when he reviewed the images, “I was just completely floored. Never before in my life had I had such a strong feeling that I was looking at something that was really the future of an industry.” He felt “a tremendous peace of mind just not to worry about what was going on inside my skin.” He realized that others would pay to feel the same way.

Within a few years, Lacy and Attariwala had opened a clinic together in Silicon Valley. Some of the venture capitalists they screened became investors. Prenuvo ultimately raised more than seventy million dollars; its backers include the 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, the supermodel Cindy Crawford, and the former Google chairman Eric Schmidt. Prenuvo’s growth is, in part, a feat of marketing.

Full article (no paywall) here: https://archive.ph/zv3C0

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I had one in 2017 as a result of going to the ER for what turned out to be a GERD attack. They injected a drug to improve contrast. I was actually surprised that nothing much was found. I knew I had BPH but the doc said the scan didn’t show any problem. By the time all that was done I was feeling fine. Of course, they wanted to do various other things to examine and treat the GERD. I said no thanks and checked myself out. After visiting a more holistic oriented physician I made some dietary changes. Poof, GERD gone!

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Matthew Davenport, a radiologist who co-directs a cancer center at the University of Michigan […] guesses that the average person would benefit from a full-body MRI less than 0.1 per cent of the time—whereas “you have something happen to you that is expensive, annoying, psychologically harmful, or physically harmful maybe five or ten per cent of the time.”

That’s why I haven’t pursued these tests. Of course, it is a strong argument to say that it could also save your life, so isn’t it worth all the downsides? Probably not for me, but maybe in 10 years when I’m 70 years old (when the odds of early cancers are higher), the tech is better, and the cost might be lower.

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I had Prenuvo’s whole-body scan done last year. Although there was one unexpected finding, related to my brain, I felt reassured by the results. The scan also helped me better understand the source of my back pain.

My back pain did make it very difficult to lie still in the supine position for ~75 minutes.

No regrets. I plan to get another one in a few years.

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