A couple of weeks ago, I shared my final “Ask Dr. Walt” column that I wrote for the final issue of Today’s Christian Living, titled “Should I Get a Whole-Body MRI Just to “Be Safe”? — Today’s Christian Living July 2026.” This was to be the follow-up to that column. Let me know what you think in the comments.

QUESTION: Dr. Walt, I appreciated your column in the last issue where you warned against screening whole-body MRI scans, but a friend sent me a piece, “Whole-body MRI screening: a radiologist’s guide to preventive scans,” from a radiologist named Dr. Amit Newatia, who disagrees with you. Don’t his arguments change the calculus? How do I weigh his arguments against yours?

ANSWER: What a great question — and exactly the right way to think about medical decisions. Don’t take any one doctor’s word for it, including mine. Read the arguments on both sides and weigh the evidence below yourself.

Before we dive into this, I encourage readers to first read my last blog on the topic and then read Dr. Newatia’s opinion.

What’s the story on the real evidence?

 Dr. Newatia’s piece is reasonable in tone. He’s a board-certified radiologist with real training, and he raises a few fair points. But when you set his argument next to the two radiologist who published the JAMA editorial, “Elective MRI Screening of the General Public — Buyer Beware,” that I cited in my last blog, three things become clear:

1. The two pieces are not equivalent,
2. The disagreement is narrower than it first appears, and
3. On the central question — does this test help people live longer? — the evidence is firmly on one side.

Where the opposing doctors actually agree

Notice what Dr. Newatia isn’t saying. He’s not saying everyone should get one. He’s not saying it replaces a colonoscopy or a mammogram. He’s not saying incidental findings are rare. In fact, he acknowledges they happen in 40 to 50% of scans — even higher than the 30% figure I quoted from JAMA.

The fight is over a single question: Does the rare benefit of catching an early cancer outweigh the risk? and closes with the story of a 45-year-old woman whose scan caught a kidney tumor. It’s a moving story. It’s also, by itself, almost meaningless as evidence.

Imagine 1,000 healthy women getting whole-body MRIs. One has a kidney tumor caught early — wonderful for her. But what about the other 999?

• Some had benign cysts that triggered biopsies and weeks of anxiety.
• A few had indolent cancers — cancers that would never have killed them — but received surgery and radiation anyway.
• A handful had complications from the follow-up procedures themselves.

You only ever hear about the kidney-tumor woman. The hundreds of others don’t show up in marketing brochures.

Doctors call this survivorship bias, and it’s the oldest trick in screening and in alternative medicine hype:

The patient who’s helped is visible and grateful; the patients who are harmed are invisible — and just as real.

The Questions the Marketing Never Answers

When someone tells you about the patient whose life was saved, ask:

What happened to all the other patients who got the same test?

If the answer is “we don’t track that” or “we don’t have the data,” you’ve learned something important. The plural of anecdote is not evidence.

“Managed uncertainty today vs. catastrophic certainty tomorrow”

This is Dr. Newatia’s most clever sentence, and it sounds wonderfully reasonable.

But notice what it quietly assumes:

Today’s uncertain finding would have become tomorrow’s catastrophe.

For most incidental findings, that’s simply not true. That’s the very definition of overdiagnosis — Finding something worrying that would never have hurt you.

Many small tumors grow so slowly that you’d die of something else first. Others are so aggressive that finding them three months earlier doesn’t change the outcome.

The phrase “catastrophic certainty tomorrow” sounds like the alternative to scanning.

In reality, for most people, the alternative is nothing happens, ever.

Most of us walk around with small abnormalities our entire lives and die peacefully of something unrelated.

Whole-body MRI doesn’t usually find the dangerous things — most commonly it surfaces the harmless ones too, and we usually can’t reliably tell them apart on a scan.

The “fellowship-trained radiologist” argument

Dr. Newatia argues that false positives are largely a function of who reads the scan, and that a fellowship-trained body imager — someone like, well, him — gets it right far more often than the average radiologist.

He may be right that scan quality varies. I acknowledged this in last issue’s column. A 30-minute discount scan read by a generalist is not the same test as a one-hour protocol read by a subspecialist.

But here’s what’s missing:

There is no published study showing that fellowship-trained radiologists running screening centers actually achieve lower false-positive rates than the literature describes.

It’s an assertion he has a financial interest in believing.

And even if it’s true, it doesn’t answer the deeper question:

Even when read by the most qualified eyes, no whole-body MRI screening study has yet shown that the test extends life.

The Challenge No One on the Pro-Scan Side Will Answer

Show me the study where healthy adults who got whole-body MRI lived longer

or had lower cancer death rates than those who didn’t.

That study does not exist. Not after a decade of marketing. Not after 100,000-plus paid scans. If the test worked, we would know.

“Nine body regions in one session” — efficiency or expansion?

Dr. Newatia’s last argument is that one MRI replaces visits to a neurologist, a pulmonologist, a gastroenterologist, and others — all in 60 minutes.

But healthy people don’t need visits to those specialists. The reason most of us never see a neurologist for our brain or a pulmonologist for our lungs is that without symptoms, family history, or risk factors, those visits aren’t medically indicated. Saying “this scan saves you from seeing four specialists” only makes sense if those visits were warranted in the first place. For the average healthy person, they aren’t.

It’s like saying my home security system “saves me from hiring four guards.” If I didn’t need four guards in the first place, the system isn’t saving me from anything — it’s manufacturing a need it then offers to solve.

Following the money

I’m not impugning Dr. Newatia’s character or training. But on a topic where the evidence is contested, you should always ask:

Who profits from the answer?

Dr. Newatia operates a preventive screening center in Laurel, Maryland that sells the very test he’s defending. His piece does not disclose this.

By contrast, Dr. Davenport at Michigan and Dr. Reeder at Wisconsin — the JAMA authors — work at academic medical centers that don’t profit from the test.

Their warning is published in one of the most rigorously edited medical journals in the world, in a format reviewed by editors and peers before publication.

Dr. Newatia’s piece appeared on a personal-essay platform that explicitly invites doctors to share opinions and is not peer-reviewed.

That doesn’t make Dr. Newatia wrong by itself. But the burden of proof is not equal.

Scripture warns about this dynamic: “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). When someone’s livelihood depends on a particular answer, even sincere doctors can find that answer at least potentially biased.

So how do you actually weigh it?

Here’s the framework I commend to you:

• Look for the question being avoided. Newatia never directly addresses whether whole-body MRI extends life. He pivots to symptoms, scan quality, specialist coordination. The mortality question is the one that matters — and only one piece answers it.
• Weight the source. A peer-reviewed JAMA Viewpoint by academic radiologists with no financial stake outweighs an unreviewed blog post by a clinician selling the test. Conflicts of interest predictably distort which arguments get made.
• Distrust the moving anecdote. Stories of saved lives are emotionally powerful and statistically empty. Always ask, what happened to everyone else who got this test?
• Ask what changes your mind. A useful test of any medical claim: What evidence would convince me I’m wrong?For me, a randomized trial showing healthy adults who got whole-body MRI lived longer than those who didn’t would change my answer. That trial does not exist.

The Bottom Line

I actually agree with Dr. Newatia on more than we disagree on.

• We both think the standard screenings work and people should get them.
• We both think this test isn’t for everyone.

Our real disagreement is over whether the predictable harms to many are justified by the rare benefit to a few.

The published evidence — and an honest reading of his own concessions — says they are not.

Until a study shows whole-body MRI helps healthy people live longer, save your money.

A closing word

You asked the most important question a Christian patient can ask: How do I weigh competing voices?

That question is not just medical, it’s biblical. “The first to plead his case seems right, until another comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17).

Dr. Newatia’s piece sounds right until you examine it carefully. The JAMA piece holds up under examination.

I’d rather you reach a thoughtful “no” by weighing the arguments yourself than take my word for it.

That’s how mature faith and mature medicine both work — not by trusting the loudest voice, but by testing every claim against the evidence and against Scripture’s wisdom about human nature, including the very human tendency to believe what pays us best.

Save your money. Get the screenings that work. And keep reading and evaluating claims carefully.

Sources:

• Larimore WL. “Should I Get a Whole-Body MRI Just to “Be Safe”? — Today’s Christian Living July 2026.” Published in print and online.
• Davenport MS, Reeder SB. “Elective MRI Screening of the General Public — Buyer Beware.” JAMA. Published online May 6, 2026. doi:10.1001/jama.2026.5888.
• Newatia A. “Whole-body MRI screening: a radiologist’s guide to preventive scans.” KevinMD.com, March 23, 2026.
• American College of Radiology position statement on whole-body screening.

© Copyright WLL, INC. 2025. This blog provides healthcare tips and advice that you can trust about a wide variety of general health information only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your regular physician. If you are concerned about your health, take what you learn from this blog and meet with your personal doctor to discuss your concerns.