The Pan-Scan Scam

Arjun S. Byju dissects the cultural and scientific underpinnings of the radiological craze for full-body MRIs.

By Arjun S. ByjuMarch 29, 2026

• Science & Technology

• Politics

HANS CASTORP, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, spends seven years in a tubercular sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. During much of this time, he is enamored with fellow convalescent Clavdia Chauchat, who eventually gives him a gift: an X-ray of her chest. He carries this token in his breast pocket, and when captured by longing, he retrieves the glass slide for contemplation:

[H]e flung himself into his chair, and drew out his keepsake, his treasure, that consisted, this time, not of a few reddish-brown shavings, but a thin glass plate, which must be held toward the light to see anything on it. It was Clavdia’s X-ray portrait, showing not her face, but the delicate bony structure of the upper half of her body, and the organs of the thoracic cavity, surrounded by the pale, ghostlike envelope of flesh. (Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, 1927.)

That an X-ray could elicit such romantic fervor was not unusual at the time. In the early part of the 20th century, women often had their hands X-rayed to give to paramours as an “intimate photograph.” The iconography of the bony skeleton, and its attendant implication of peering through flesh (and clothing), titillated a population still shaped by Victorian ideals of privacy and propriety.

In the century since the publication of Mann’s novel, X-rays have lost much of their erotic appeal, but that doesn’t mean they are not still subject to social and political currents. In the last few years, amid the vertiginous rise of an online health consciousness propelled by biohackers, self-improvement dogmatists, and longevity “experts,” a new radiological craze has emerged, the whole-body MRI scan. It is imbued with as much symbolic heft as the lovers’ skiagraph.

Billed as a prudent precaution and marketed with the help of celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, whole-body MRIs are offered by start-ups like Prenuvo and Ezra. The service is predictably expensive (about $2,500 for Prenuvo, not covered by insurance) but is purported to catch all manner of early and asymptomatic maladies. And as with the intimate portraiture of a century ago, a prominent clientele is signing on to the fad. A Reddit thread documents countless celebs who have had their whole bodies scanned by Prenuvo, ranging from Gwyneth Paltrow to Kris Jenner. The merit of such endorsements is questioned in the comments—as one user mused, “Any product I see being promoted by the Kardashians, it feels like it’s a scammy cash grab. Immediate turn off.”

It is perhaps a little out of touch for multimillionaires to flaunt expensive scans—which they received for free—while one-third of Americans are unable to access basic, quality healthcare and medical debt remains the number one cause of bankruptcy. But the association with affluence and exclusivity is part of the aura of the MRI as a status symbol. According to Prenuvo’s own website, it is backed by “leading venture capital firms,” the model Cindy Crawford, and a co-founder of George Clooney’s tequila brand. Function Health, the parent company of Ezra, boasts Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, and Magic Johnson as investors. Prenuvo partners with Ikon Pass, Function with Equinox and Erewhon.

As it turns out, the A-list blitz is working. According to corporate reports, Prenuvo has performed over 100,000 scans, and is rapidly opening imaging centers across North America, from Jacksonville, Florida, to Portland, Oregon. At the end of 2025, Function Health was valued at $2.5 billion.

As a physician training in diagnostic radiology, I have been asked by patients, friends, and family whether a “preventative MRI” is a good idea. Assuming one is lucky enough to afford the indulgence of a head-to-toe photo shoot—what we in the business call a pan-scan—what harm could come from a little more information? MRIs have no ionizing radiation. Most people know someone who has been diagnosed with cancer. Why not catch it early?

The truth is, for the major categories of cancer, one would do better with standard screening. Regular breast MRI is performed with a patient prone and using IV contrast to isolate tumors (the most common malignancy in women); Prenuvo and Ezra acquire images with the patient on her back and without contrast. Colon cancer—the second deadliest—is notoriously difficult to see on imaging, especially without bowel preparation. Colonoscopy, on the other hand, allows for the early detection and removal of polyps. Cervical cancer is still caught asymptomatically with the inexpensive and century-old Pap smear. And while lung cancer screening is recommended for individuals who have smoked more than 20 pack-years, that screening is not with MRI but with CT (which has ionizing radiation).

As McGill University, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Fred Hutch Cancer Center explain, full-body MRIs use a large field of view, meaning less detail on any individual body part, trading depth for breadth. Yet they also reveal incidentalomas—masses, lumps, and bumps of uncertain clinical significance that likely would never have created a problem. By some estimates, nearly 95 percent of full-body MRIs had at least one incidental, though only nine percent were related to cancer. Even those proven to be cancer may be the indolent, nonlethal types. After all, 59 percent of men over 79 have prostate cancer on autopsy.

Once scanned, these findings can’t be unseen, and they inevitably lead to follow-up imaging, biopsies, and even surgeries, all of which carry risks. As Dhruv Khullar recounts in The New Yorker, follow-ups from third-party pan-scans go through regular insurance carriers and hospitals, spiking healthcare costs for the rest of us. This is the answer to the question “What’s the harm?” Though difficult to parse at an individual level, costs manifest clearly at a population scale. Frequently cited is South Korea’s experiment with screening ultrasound for thyroid cancer: data showed increased diagnosis but no impact on cancer mortality. This is the same reason we do not perform whole breast ultrasound screening: studies suggest that screening ultrasound leads to higher false positives, more biopsies, and no increase in cancer detection.

Yet deliberating the statistical pros and cons of full-body MRIs—wading into the minutiae of positive-predictive value and lead time bias—misses the broader point. For one thing, pan-scan proponents maintain that data will eventually vindicate them with the continued evolution of screening guidelines. But more importantly, pan-scans already have a symbolic cachet independent of their diagnostic precision. These highly technical images have escaped the narrow confines of the radiologists’ reading room and—like Clavdia’s diapositive a century ago—carry connotations beyond the clinical. Whether they’re a gimmick or a game changer, the proliferation of direct-to-consumer MRIs impacts culture as much as it reflects it.

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In Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging In the Twentieth Century, her sweeping 1997 history of radiology, Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles argues that radiographs have as much or even more impact on public consciousness as they have within hospitals. She catalogs the role of X-rays in the early feminist movement—images of deformed ribs strengthened the crusade against corsets—and in establishing a novel conception of child abuse, then called “parental-induced trauma.” When John Hinckley Jr. was tried for attempting to assassinate Ronald Reagan, Hinckley’s lawyers used CT scans of his brain to prove innocence by insanity, enshrining a biophysical theory of mental illness.

According to Kevles, widespread radiology consecrated a way of thinking about visual and physical limits: “As a culture, we no longer accept surfaces as barriers, but see them instead as smoky scrims through which we know we have access, not just doctors but all of us—patients, poets, and passers-by.” This is the mandate of Prenuvo and Ezra, both of which invite the customer to peel back the shadows surrounding their own bodies and quantify their health with Oura Rings, Continuous Glucose Monitors, or, in Function’s case, a battery of over 100 blood tests.

This inducement toward incessant self-observation is the subject of the 2015 book The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging, in which José van Dijck interrogates what she calls the “medical-endoscopic gaze.” Borrowing from Michel Foucault, who quipped that modern bodies are “sites where organs and eyes meet,” Van Dijck posits that 21st-century health is fundamentally mediated—usually via screens. As far as modern medicine goes, seeing is believing.

Pan-scan companies embrace this conceit, favoring expensive tools over simple acts like listening and touching, thereby eroding faith and expertise in the physical exam, and even in patients’ own subjective sense of health. This codifies what Joseph Dumit, in writing about brain scans, has called a kind of “biotechnopower”—an insistence on using tools to tell us what category of person we might be.

For example, when asked what a pan-scan revealed for him, Emi Gal, the founder of Ezra, said he was encouraged to start a statin after he got a chest CT (separate from the MRI), which showed a high amount of calcium in his coronary arteries. At first, this reads as a hopeful anecdote: spurred by a harrowing image, a young man sobers up about his health. But Gal admits that he has a strong family history of heart disease and his LDL (the bad cholesterol) was 200 before he started medication. Up to 25 percent of men around Gal’s age have coronary calcium, so it’s not exactly a rare discovery, but more importantly, guidelines already recommend starting a statin for anyone with an LDL above 190! Gal underwent needless expense (and radiation) to start a cheap, generic drug—one of the most prescribed in the entire world—that he could easily have gotten after a standard lipid panel and a brief chat with a GP.

A few superfluous CTs would be one thing, but if the pan-scan purveyors have their way, it may be all we have left of American medicine. Function Health’s chief medical officer Mark Hyman—recently named a contributor on Bari Weiss’s CBS News—has long promulgated dubious pseudoscientific claims, such as treating autism with cod liver oil and aging skin with unverified peptide injections, and he funnels customers from Function’s lab tests and pan-scans to his online store of hundreds of supplements. Hyman has co-authored multiple books with evangelical pastor Rick Warren and is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a longtime vaccine skeptic and ally of RFK Jr. Casey Means, Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, is also an investor in Hyman’s company.

Function Health is backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose co-founder Marc Andreessen is a donor and adviser to Trump. In fact, Andreessen Horowitz is tied to much of the United States’ healthcare future: six out of seven start-ups that recently met with RFK Jr. were backed by the firm. (Andreessen also invested in Weiss’s The Free Press.) The tech billionaire seems to be getting a fair return on his investment, as the Trump administration is gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and softening scrutiny of cryptocurrency and AI firms.

What is so unsettling about full-body MRIs is not just their superfluity or codification of healthcare inequality but also what they symbolize about the corporate capture and celebrity-washing of modern healthcare. The Make America Healthy Again clique distrusts contemporary medicine but promises cutting-edge technologies like MRIs. They appeal to the wealthy’s sense of grievance while disenfranchising the poor. And though they reasonably bellow against the pernicious effects of the profit motive in healthcare, calling out compromised doctors and institutions, they hand over the reins to a small cadre of tech bros, Hollywood stars, and very compromised doctors—all of whom need to make a buck for venture capital.

The result is a health landscape in which the most expensive and speculative technologies of conventional medicine replace the cheap and validated—yes to MRIs, no to vaccines—and are left to incubate alongside New Age remedies. One man interviewed by The New York Times reported that, after Prenuvo caught an undiagnosed lymphoma, he was inspired to finally take his health seriously. His new regimen: “infrared saunas, cold plunge pools, red light therapy.”

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When Wilhelm Röntgen, a then-unknown physicist at the University of Würzburg, announced his discovery of the X-ray in December 1895, the first image he took was of his wife Anna Bertha’s hand. Upon glimpsing the hazy image of her skeletal fingers, Frau Röntgen is supposed to have gasped, “I have seen my own death.”

From then on, medical imaging has conjured mortality, even as radiology became ubiquitous. Cartoons from the early 1900s frequently depicted the Grim Reaper haunting radiographers, while scientists, like Sir William Crookes, believed X-rays could capture ghostly apparitions, penetrating into the world of the dead. Even Hans Castorp, the pining Alpine consumptive, finds a morbid metaphor in his own X-ray. In a scene that Van Dijck notes is almost certainly an allusion to Anna Bertha Röntgen’s famous photograph, Castorp comprehends death in a radiograph of his hand:

Castorp saw, precisely […] what he had never thought it would be vouchsafed him to see: he looked into his own grave. The process of decay was forestalled by the powers of the light-ray, the flesh in which he walked disintegrated, annihilated, dissolved in vacant mist, and there within it was the finely turned skeleton of his own hand, the seal ring he had inherited from his grandfather hanging loose and black on the joint of his ring-finger—a hard, material object, with which man adorns the body that is fated to melt away beneath it, when it passes on to another flesh that can wear it for yet a little while. […] [H]e gazed at this familiar part of his own body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die.

The MRI boosters understand this too; in the words of an early X-ray enthusiast (quoted by Kevles), radiology is a “veritable autopsy of the living.” For pan-scanners, this realization has prompted a manic quest for immortality. The motto of Function is “100 Healthy Years.” Ezra collaborated with Bryan Johnson—infamous for transfusing blood from his son and authoring a book titled Don’t Die (2023)—on the “Blueprint longevity scan.” Peter Attia, one of the elder statesmen of the longevity podcast circuit and also a contributor to Weiss’s CBS News, speaks frequently about the “marginal decade” as a lost opportunity for flourishing before death. Not wanting to miss out, Attia (whose ties to Jeffrey Epstein were recently revealed) co-founded his own full-body MRI company last year, with membership starting at $7,500.

A wayward fascination with youth is nothing new, though the rise of “wellness culture” is making this eccentric-millionaire style of thanatophobia all too mainstream. If the start-ups have their way, one day soon we might all be getting pan-scans, having our stool analyzed for microbiomic fluctuations, our genes edited to perfection, and our defunct organs replaced. Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005) and The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI (2024), maintains that within a few years, we will have nanobots traversing our veins, immortality just around the corner.

On the other hand, maybe this whole trend will blow up, vanish overnight with the recession we keep hearing is inevitable or a tsunami of repressed self-destruction. Alcohol consumption is the lowest it’s been since Prohibition and weight lifting has never been more popular, but cultural forces react to their opposites. Richard Nixon followed the Summer of Love; Donald Trump took office after Barack Obama. Pan-scans might fizzle out as the pendulum swings away from the zealotry of grind culture, of subjecting ourselves to infinite tests and datafication and surveillance, the constant personal improvement now called “maxxing.” One hundred years of anxiety, some will grumble. What happened to living fast and dying young? Already, they say smoking is becoming cool again. Private scanning centers came and went in the early 2000s. Who’s to say history won’t repeat?

Even Emi Gal, the founder of Ezra, hints at this looming tide of profound fatigue with optimization. He mentions that he used to take 50 supplements a day in the hopes of extending his lifespan (Kurzweil, for comparison, used to knock back at least 200). But in 2025, Gal halted this routine, reflecting, “This is too much. I don’t have time for it. I wonder if it’s actually doing anything.” He dialed back to four supplements, the only few proven in randomized controlled trials to reduce all-cause mortality: vitamin D, omega-3, magnesium, and creatine. These are simple, cheap pills—the kind you can buy in bulk at Costco. “None of my biomarkers have changed,” Gal concluded. “It’s one of those areas where less is more.”

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Featured image: Huggins’s engraving “The New Roentgen Photography,” 1896, is in the public domain. Accessed March 24, 2026. Image has been cropped.