Should I Get a Whole-Body MRI Just to “Be Safe”?

QUESTION: Dr. Walt, several friends at church have paid out of pocket for a whole-body MRI scan — the kind Kim Kardashian and other celebrities have been raving about online. They tell me it’s “the smartest thing I’ve ever done for my health.” My wife and I are healthy, but at our age (early 60s), the idea of catching something early is appealing. Is this a wise use of $2,500? Should we do it?

ANSWER: I get this question a lot lately, and a brand-new article in the May 6, 2026 issue of JAMA, the world’s most-read medical journal, gives me the clearest answer I’ve been able to offer in years: probably not. For most healthy adults, the science says you’re more likely to be harmed than helped. Let me explain why — and what the Bible has to say about how we steward our bodies, our money, and our peace of mind.

What Is a Whole-Body MRI Screen?

Companies like Prenuvo and Ezra  offer an hour-long MRI that promises to look at virtually every organ — brain, spine, liver, pancreas, kidneys, ovaries, prostate — searching for cancers, aneurysms, and “more than 500 conditions” before symptoms appear. No radiation. No needles. No contrast dye. Just slide into the tube and let the magnets do their work.

The price tag runs $999 to $2,499 per scan, with “executive” packages near $5,000. None is covered by insurance.

More than 100,000 Americans have already paid out of pocket, and the industry is growing fast. The pitch is intoxicating: peace of mind, or a life saved. Who wouldn’t want that?

But two of the country’s most respected radiologists — Dr. Matthew Davenport at the University of Michigan and Dr. Scott Reeder at the University of Wisconsin — just published a JAMA “Viewpoint” titled “Elective MRI Screening of the General Public — Buyer Beware.” Their conclusion, echoed by cardiologist and longevity expert Dr. Eric Topol, is sobering: there is no evidence these scans extend life or improve health for healthy people, and a great deal of evidence they cause real harm.

The Three-in-Ten Problem

When you scan a healthy body with a tool this sensitive, you don’t just find cancer. You find everything — every cyst, every benign nodule, every shadow that could be something but probably isn’t. Radiologists call these “incidentalomas.” Studies of whole-body MRI in asymptomatic people estimate false-positive rates around 16%, and the JAMA authors describe a roughly 3-in-10 chance that a scan turns up a finding that creates real uncertainty.

What does “uncertainty” cost you? Davenport and Reeder propose a consent form for these scans that reads — almost word for word — like this:

There is a 3 in 10 chance we find something that creates uncertainty for you, which could result in anxiety, sleeplessness, financial strain, life disruption, more imaging, invasive procedures, or possibly surgery. Although cancer will be identified in 1 or 2 out of 100 people, finding cancer with this test is unlikely to help you because most types will be low risk or already advanced. There are no studies showing that undergoing this test will improve the quality or length of your life.

Read that again slowly. That is not anti-screening propaganda. That is two of America’s leading radiologists telling you what an honest informed-consent document would have to say.

Defenders of these scans will note — fairly — that not every whole-body MRI is the same. A 30-minute discount scan is not a one-hour, fellowship-read protocol with proper diffusion-weighted imaging.

True. But here’s the catch:

Even at the highest-quality centers, with the best machines and most experienced radiologists, no published study has shown that whole-body MRI extends life or reduces cancer mortality in healthy adults. The technology has gotten better. The evidence of benefit hasn’t arrived.

Dr. Topol makes the same point. He notes that a prominent physician-writer for The New Yorker underwent a whole-body MRI, was told he had a prostate “nodule,” and ended up enduring biopsies and complications — for a finding that, in all likelihood, would never have shortened his life.

Why “Finding Cancer Early” Isn’t Always the Win You Think

This is the part most patients don’t understand:

Finding cancer early only helps if early treatment changes the outcome.

For some cancers — colon, cervical, breast — early detection saves lives. We have decades of randomized data proving it. That’s why colonoscopy and mammography are recommended.

But many of the cancers a whole-body MRI is most likely to find fall into two groups that are essentially un-helpable:

• Indolent cancers that would never have caused you harm in your lifetime. Treating them anyway exposes you to surgery, radiation, and side effects without benefit. We call this overdiagnosis.
• Already-advanced cancers that would be caught soon enough by symptoms, where finding them a few months earlier doesn’t change the prognosis.

The cancers in the sweet spot — aggressive enough to kill you but slow enough that catching them at scan-time would actually save you — are statistically rare.

That’s why, after more than a decade of these scans being marketed and over 100,000 of them performed:

Not a single published study has shown that whole-body MRI screening makes anyone live longer. Not one.

The American College of Radiology specifically does not recommend whole-body MRI for average-risk, asymptomatic adults, and no major medical organization has endorsed it. If this test worked, we would know by now.

A Costly Substitute for the Real Thing

One quiet danger of these scans is that people use them to replace the screenings that actually work. A whole-body MRI does not screen the breast adequately, cannot see colon polyps, doesn’t evaluate the heart, and can’t replace a cervical cancer scree  or a low-dose lung CT if you’re a smoker.

If you skip your mammogram or colonoscopy because “I already had my Prenuvo,” you’ve traded a proven life-saver for an unproven one.

The Stewardship Question

Now let me speak as a believer, not just a physician. Scripture is clear that our bodies are not our own — “You were bought at a price; therefore honor God with your bodies” (1 Corinthians 6:20). Caring for our health is part of that stewardship. So is caring for the resources God has entrusted to us.

Two thousand five hundred dollars is real money.

For most families, it’s a month’s mortgage, a year of groceries for a missionary family, or a generous gift to kingdom work.

Spending it on a test that, on the best available evidence, is more likely to harm you than help is hard to defend on biblical stewardship grounds — especially when you factor in the downstream cost of biopsies, follow-up scans, and surgeries the initial scan may set in motion.

There’s also the matter of our peace.

Anxiety is one of the most common and least-discussed harms of overdiagnosis.

I have walked patients through months of sleepless nights waiting on follow-ups for a finding that turned out to be nothing. Jesus told us, “Do not worry about your life” (Matthew 6:25).

Paying $2,500 to manufacture worry is a strange use of resources for those who claim the peace that surpasses understanding.

So What Should You Do?

Here’s what I tell my patients — and what I do myself:

• Get the screenings the evidence actually supports. Mammography. Colonoscopy or stool-based testing. Cervical cancer screening. Low-dose chest CT for current and former smokers. Skin checks. Blood pressure, cholesterol, and A1C. Unglamorous, but they save real lives.
• Talk to your doctor about your family history. A small number of people — those with strong family histories of certain cancers, or known genetic syndromes like Li-Fraumeni or Lynch syndrome — do benefit from whole-body imaging. Your physician can help sort out whether you fall into that group.
• Spend your “wellness budget” where the evidence is. Walking thirty minutes a day, eating more vegetables and less ultraprocessed food, sleeping seven to eight hours, maintaining strong relationships, worshiping faithfully, and managing stress will do more for your healthspan than any scan on the market.
• Be skeptical of celebrity medicine — and follow the money. When the loudest voices recommending a test are influencers in scrubs and venture-capital-backed startups, and the quietest voices are the radiologists at major academic centers who actually read the scans, listen to the radiologists.
• And when a physician — on TV, online, or in print — enthusiastically recommends whole-body MRI, ask one question: Does this doctor own, work at, or financially benefit from a screening center that sells this scan? You’d be surprised how often the answer is yes, and how rarely it gets disclosed.

The Bottom Line

A whole-body MRI for a healthy adult is a test no medical guideline recommends, paid for entirely by you, with a roughly 30% chance of generating uncertainty, a 1–2% chance of finding a cancer (most of which won’t be helped by the finding), and zero evidence it makes you live longer or better.

The honest answer to “should I get one?” is almost always no.

Save your money. Get the screenings that work. Walk with your spouse. Love your neighbor. And rest in the One who numbers your days (Psalm 139:16) — not in a magnet that promises what it cannot deliver.

Sources:

• Davenport MS, Reeder SB. Elective MRI Screening of the General Public—Buyer Beware. JAMA. Published online May 06, 2026. doi:10.1001/jama.2026.5888.
• Topol E, commentary on whole-body MRI screening, X.com (2026-05-06)  KevinMD.com (2026-05-06).
• American College of Radiology position statement on whole-body screening. April 17, 2023.
• Prenuvo and Ezra published pricing.