RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) — If a patient is experiencing pain or concerning symptoms, doctors can use magnetic resonance imaging, better known as an MRI scan, to try to figure out what’s wrong. Now, some people, who aren’t experiencing any symptoms at all, are choosing to pay thousands of dollars for a scan of their entire body.
It’s a trend that celebrities like Kim Kardashian are getting in on, and it’s available right here in Raleigh. Whether it’s a good idea depends on whom you ask.
Rachel Johnson thought she was perfectly healthy until a routine mammogram led to a breast cancer diagnosis.
“When you are diagnosed with a disease that you had no signs or symptoms of, your brain starts to spiral. What else could there be?” she wondered. “It really resonated with me that this [mammogram] was preventive care. Why don’t we have preventive care for the rest of our body?”
Determined to make sure nothing else was wrong, she started searching online and came across whole body screening MRI scans. “I saw a lot of celebrities were having these done,” she recalled. She found the scans are available at Raleigh Radiology.
Dr. John Bardini is a musculoskeletal radiologist and serves as the Director of Imaging Centers at Raleigh Radiology. He said the company started offering whole-body screening MRI scans earlier this year.
“We could look at your brain, your chest, your abdomen, pelvis, and then even your lower extremities, so it’s basically for screening the body for any abnormality,” he explained. “The trend has been for people to take control of their health care, and people oftentimes want to know what’s going on in their body.”
“Unfortunately, some diseases you won’t have symptoms until it’s too late,” he continued, referencing pancreatic cancer as an example.
The screenings are not covered by insurance, and the price tag for the whole body scan is nearly $2,995 For about $1,995, you can scan just the head and torso, and the torso alone runs $1,500.
Johnson admitted the cost was hard to stomach. “Ouch,” she recalled thinking. “And I knew that insurance wasn’t going to touch it.” Still, she decided to move forward with the scan.
“At that moment, for my husband and I and just with everything that was going on in my medical, it just felt like something that was worth it at that time,” she explained.
Some doctors argue the scans are not worth it for most patients. Dr. Mustafa Bashir is a Professor of Radiology with Duke Health.
“Average-risk people just don’t have that high a rate of diseases or cancers that can be picked up by a whole-body MRI, so the main risk is that you spend your money and just don’t get anything back for it,” he said.
The American College of Radiology does not recommend total body screening for most people. A statement on the college’s website reads in part, “The American College of Radiology® (ACR®), at this time, does not believe there is sufficient evidence to justify recommending total body screening for patients with no clinical symptoms, risk factors or a family history suggesting underlying disease or serious injury.”
“There are also some secondary risks related to false positive findings,” added Bashir. “You may see a spot somewhere that needs to be worked up – it needs more testing that type of thing – and the likelihood that that will actually be a problem, something that needs to be treated, will be really, really low, but you’ll still have to spend more money and more time and anxiety, and so on, just dealing with that spot.”
CBS 17 asked Bardini about the risk of unnecessary follow-up testing. “That’s been the concern for years; however, we deal with those things called incidental findings,” he responded. “There aren’t many findings where you’re going to go right to surgery or you’re going to go right to a biopsy.” Bardini contended that all kinds of scans pick up unrelated findings, and there are guidelines about what to do in various situations.
He noted that MRIs are not ideal for detecting problems with the heart and lungs and emphasized that these screenings should never replace recommended screenings like mammograms or colonoscopies. Still, he said these full-body scans have the potential to catch some diseases in time to treat them and prevent them from becoming more serious or deadly.
According to Bardini, 14 or 15 patients have gotten these scans in the first six months they’ve been available in the Triangle. “Have you found any concerns, like cancer?” CBS 17’s Maggie Newland asked.
“We found kidney cancer, renal cell carcinoma, in a woman, and it was pretty early,” Bardini answered. “It was a small tumor, so we did find that and she did not have any symptoms.”
Johnson was grateful to learn that that none of the findings in her scan raised concern. “I wanted to know about my brain, my lungs, my heart, my kidneys, my spleen, you know, everything. And it all came back great,” she said.
So was that peace of mind worth the nearly $3,000 price tag?
In her case, Johnson believes it was. “For me,” she said, “It was absolutely worth it.”
