Celebrities Are Raving About Full-Body Scans. Doctors Urge Caution

Prenuvo, the company behind the whole-body MRI scans that Busy Philipps and a growing list of celebrities have credited with catching hidden health problems, doesn't pay for those endorsements in the usual sense. It gives free scans to high-profile people in exchange for what it calls an honest review, if they feel like sharing one. That arrangement matters for how the current wave of enthusiasm should be read: it's a seeding campaign, run by a company that has raised roughly $275 million, including a $120 million round in February 2025 led by Forerunner Ventures, with 23andMe cofounder Anne Wojcicki among its backers.

No major medical body endorses the practice for people without symptoms. The American College of Preventive Medicine lists whole-body scanning as low-value and overused on its Choosing Wisely guidance, and the FDA's longstanding position is that there is no evidence whole-body scanning of asymptomatic people provides more benefit than harm, which is why insurers won't cover it. A review of 12 studies found that about 95 percent of asymptomatic people who get scanned turn up at least one abnormal finding, but roughly 91 percent of those findings turn out not to be clinically relevant. One study of 6,000 scans found abnormalities in 95 percent of people and an actual malignancy in just 1.8 percent.

Dhruv Khullar, a physician who wrote about getting scanned himself for The New Yorker, put the medical consensus plainly: no professional medical society in America endorses whole-body MRIs as a proactive screening tool. His own scan turned up an ambiguous prostate lesion, the kind of finding doctors call an incidentaloma, which led to further workups without a clear payoff. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center made a similar case publicly last August, pointing to cost, low diagnostic yield, and the cascade of follow-up scans, specialist visits, and biopsies that an ambiguous result can trigger in someone who was healthy to begin with.

Philipps's own case complicates that caution. Her physician had told her she was too healthy to need a scan; she got one anyway after seeing the trend on social media, and it found a brain tumor she had no symptoms of, removed in surgery on March 2. That outcome is the strongest argument scan companies have, a real tumor a risk-based screening approach would have left undetected.

A pending lawsuit points the other way. Sean Clifford sued Prenuvo in New York State Supreme Court in September 2024, alleging a radiologist missed what the filing describes as abrupt focal 60 percent narrowing of his right middle cerebral artery on a July 2023 scan, reported at the time as normal vasculature. Clifford suffered a stroke in March 2024 that left him with paralysis, vision impairment, and cognitive effects. A judge has rejected Prenuvo's attempt to cap damages under California law, and the case is proceeding without that cap.

The scans on offer are MRI-based and radiation-free, distinct from whole-body CT screening, which carries cumulative radiation exposure that the ACPM and FDA have separately flagged as a cancer-risk concern. That distinction gets blurred in coverage of the trend but matters for anyone weighing the actual tradeoffs. It doesn't change the core finding from the research: the harm these MRI scans pose isn't radiation, but the false alarms and unnecessary follow-up care that come from screening people who have no reason to expect a problem.

The category is no longer a one-company story. Ezra, now owned by Function Health, offers full-body MRI scans for about $499, roughly a third of Prenuvo's price. Neko Health, cofounded by Spotify's Daniel Ek, raised $700 million in a Series C last month at a valuation near $7 billion, four times what it was worth in its January 2025 round, and opened its first U.S. location in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood in August. Prenuvo says it has now run more than 170,000 scans, up from 150,000 earlier this year, after launching a membership model meant to turn what was once an occasional splurge into a recurring purchase.

Scans that insurers won't cover because there's no demonstrated benefit are still eligible for payment through FSA and HSA accounts, tax-advantaged funds meant for medical necessity. That leaves a healthy person weighing a purchase with two contradictory signals from the health system at once: the government subsidizing it through the tax code, and the government's own drug and device regulator saying the evidence doesn't support it.