Companies like Prenuvo and Ezra will use magnetic resonance imaging to reveal what’s inside you—for a price. Illustration by Jack Sachs The physician Dhruv Khullar was skeptical of the rise in companies offering full-body scans, which have attracted celebrity investors and endorsers, and become another desired medical product for those attempting to hack their way to better health. “When doctors screen healthy people with highly sensitive tests like MRIs, they tend to turn up a barrage of ambiguous findings,” he writes. “Is that an aneurysm waiting to burst, or a harmless vascular variant? Is that a deadly cancer, or just a blob of fibrous tissue?” The quest amounts mostly to too much information, and can be expensive, time-consuming, and even psychologically harmful. And, yet, despite these misgivings, and his faith in evidence-based medicine, this fall, Khullar showed up at an office in New York to get scanned. What did the results tell him about his health, the very idea of what it means to be well, and about the future of patients as medical consumers? Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » |
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