Reality star Kim Kardashian posted about her $2,500 full-body MRI scan.
How it started
On Tuesday, the 42-year-old reality star posted two images on Instagram about her recent MRI scan from Prenuvo, calling the technology ‘life saving.’
In her words: ‘The Prenuvo full-body scan has the ability to detect cancer and diseases such as aneurysms in its earliest stages, before symptoms arise,’ she wrote in her post, which garnered more than 2 million likes.
‘It has really saved one of my friends [sic] lives and I just wanted to share.’
Meanwhile, there is no evidence that Prenuvo’s scans, which cost $2,500 and don’t take insurance, have any clinical benefit.
In contrary opinion..
Dr Tyler Black, psychiatrist and pharmacologist in Canada, wrote on Twitter that Prenuvo scans ‘have not been studied in any clinical trial, and typically screening asymptomatic people with imaging leads to more harm (via false positives) than benefit (true positives).
‘They are likely part of a vulture medicine movement which seek to extract money from healthy people under the guise of “giving patients more information”.
‘As someone who went through a year of worry [and] tests due to an incidental MRI lung finding (false positive), it really sucks.
‘Your heart is great, but um, we found a nodule in your lung…” I was not “empowered” in the months that followed, I was scared I had cancer.
‘The literature on nodules like mine was not reassuring “they can be benign or malignant.”
‘While I was relieved once further tests showed it was likely benign, I did not benefit from the experience. I suffered every night thinking about it, especially trying to sleep. Plus the tests I went through have their own risks.’
The American College of Preventive Medicine does not recommend whole-body scans for people without symptoms, citing a lack of evidence of their effectiveness.
Dr Fischer said that preventative MRIs do not show many diseases that are on the rise in the US, including diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, hypertension, and high cholesterol.
What netizen say
In the comments of Kardashian’s post, users said that these scans are inaccessible to most people. ‘Kim, this is for wealthy people. People can’t afford food right now,’ one user said.
Another commented: ‘The fact majority of society can’t even afford insurance for a simple wellness checkup.’
And a user on Twitter said: ‘I usually take all my medical advice from Kim Kardashian! I’m already penciled in for a lobotomy next week.’
Instead of opting for expensive scans, Dr Fischer recommended speaking to your doctor about any health concerns and more affordable tests.
‘There is no one screening test for human health. If there was, we’d all be very healthy indeed,’ he said.
