I have been preoccupied with looking inside the skin sack I inhabit since I heard comedian Jacqueline Novak compare being in a body to being tethered to a window. “It’s like we’re in an upper level, staring out a window, and we can’t turn around and look inside the house,” she said.
I began to feel an acute alienation from my house during the pandemic, mostly because I had embraced the possibility of waiting-room exposure to the coronavirus as an excuse to avoid the doctor altogether, while simultaneously fretting that doing so was allowing some other debilitating disease to fester within. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that whole-body M.R.I. scans, such as those offered by Prenuvo, a company founded in 2018, are experiencing a boom at this anxious juncture.
Prenuvo in particular has also been successful in courting influencer testimonies: Kim Kardashian got a whole-body scan; Maria Menounos learned she had pancreatic cancer via a Prenuvo scan. “I got to spend an hour in this incredible machine watching Kiss The Ground with tears streaming down my face understanding just how fleeting it all is,” wrote Vampire Diaries actor Ian Somerhalder in an Instagram caption about his Prenuvo experience. But criticisms have blighted the company’s good press, like spots on an otherwise pristine brain. Some have questioned whether whole-body scans give clients a false sense of security: Prenuvo scans can’t evaluate the heart or lungs nearly as well as a CT scan. Nor are they likely to provide answers to mysteries related to the bowel and stomach. (Prenuvo’s pre-scan waiver details these and other limitations, as well as the possibility for false negatives and false positives, like all medical tests.) Other critics have debated the value of a screening that might set off anxiety, or a Sisyphean vortex of further tests—biopsies and scans that involve radiation, which should be done sparingly. “There is no documented evidence that total body screening is cost-efficient or effective in prolonging life,” the American College of Radiology said in April. (Prenuvo says its body scans can detect over 500 medical conditions, which helps patients make proactive decisions about their health.)
But still, I wanted—no, needed—to see inside. I run anxious. Plus, I had benefited before from learning about the minutiae of my body. In 2021, for instance, I got a Fitbit and discovered that I had terrible sleep quality. I scaled back my wine intake and populated my bedroom with white-noise devices, and now I generally get “good” sleep, per Fitbit. And whenever my Fitbit shows my resting heart rate creeping up, I at least try to de-stress. I am not particularly good at “listening to my body” on my own. Technology can be an effective megaphone.
So in late October, I arrived at Prenuvo’s clinic in Dallas, the closest to my home, in Austin. You must fast for four hours prior to your scan, and I was foggy from skipping breakfast. I had last gotten an M.R.I. as a child, and I remembered discomfort and boredom. Now, the receptionist explained, you can stream television during the scan, via a mirror over the machine, which reflects a screen behind it. When she asked me what I would like to stream, I responded instantly, “Gilmore Girls, Season One, Episode Six.” Twenty minutes later, when the technician inserted me into the machine, panic button in my hand, Lorelai and Rory were already queued up. Lying perfectly still for a scan had been almost impossible for me at age 11. But now, Gilmore Girls above me, cozy on a plastic cushion that reminded me of camp mattresses, it felt very meditative. I would have fallen asleep, surrounded by mechanical jungle sounds—nice piano, mean piano, foghorn, bonk, belch—except that you have to do occasional breath holds. When I emerged from the machine, my hair, which had still been damp when I arrived, had dried into a kind of shelf. I felt like I was in a post-spa fugue. I sped to my favorite Dallas diner and ordered a waffle and maximum bacon, figuring that if I was to receive concerning news in a few days, I might as well live life to the wa-fullest (sorry) in the meantime.
The following Wednesday night, I received an e-mail from Prenuvo announcing that my report was complete. I clicked it immediately. There was, as I’ve long suspected, a structural issue in my corporeal home. The “nervous system” category indicated two minor findings: one was a mild degenerative change in my cervical spine; the other was severe scoliosis. My “cervicothoracic junction” looked like the spine of a sardine crammed into the corner of the tin.
I’d last considered scoliosis in the fifth grade, when the school nurse took each of us out into the hallway one by one during homeroom and palpated our spines to declare us afflicted or scoliosis-free. I sensed then, and know now, that she was merely winging it. All the popular girls had scoliosis, each returning to their seats to be solemnly comforted by their friends and, crucially, by the boys. I trust my memory that I did not have scoliosis because I so badly wished I did.
And yet, it appeared that I’d had scoliosis in childhood, the Prenuvo nurse practitioner who did the follow-up explained to me. “They didn’t notice when you went to the doctor?” she asked. Actually, I’d been experiencing pain in one side of my neck for more than a year and had several times raised this with assorted concierge physicians, one of whom had referred me to a physical therapist whom I visited a few times. Nobody had proposed scoliosis. “Interesting, because it’s severe,” the Prenuvo nurse practitioner said. “Usually it’s mild when we see it. Or if it is severe, the person knew about it.”
Now I was faced with the question of what to do about it. While I surely would have taken action had my report indicated something more sinister, scoliosis was, after all, a minor finding. If I was asymptomatic, my report said, no action was necessary, but if I was having symptoms, further imaging—including a CT scan—might be useful.
I contacted Dr. Baron S. Lonner, chief of Minimally Invasive Scoliosis Surgery and Pediatric Spine at Mount Sinai Hospital, to help me contextualize my report. First, I asked Lonner how seriously one should take a scoliosis detection on an M.R.I., given that a standing X-ray is the best way to evaluate the condition. He told me that a reclining M.R.I. actually tends to minimize the curve of the spine, so the 35º–40º scoliosis estimated by Prenuvo may in fact be more severe. I then asked about all the ways scoliosis can express itself. I nodded along calmly as he described pain and limitation of movement, but my eyes widened when he said that many adults first notice they have scoliosis because of shifts in the body—a protuberant shoulder blade here, a shifting waistline there—and that sometimes people wake up to find that one day their clothes don’t fit the same. “One thing I really strongly suggest is: don’t put your head in the sand,” he said. “Get an X-ray, just to know what it is, and go from there. It’s better to know.” Of the whole-body scans, though, Lonner said he is “probably too chicken” to get one himself.
Some clients do have the means to pursue every detection and achieve peace of mind, namely the kind of clients who can breezily spend $2,499 on a voluntary preventive screening in the first place (as a member of the press, I was given a free scan). I plan to seek out more imaging, but likely not for a while: I’m a freelance writer, and my insurance coverage is porous at best. I asked the Prenuvo nurse practitioner whether there is anything I could do in the short term to help that wouldn’t cost as much as a trip to Mexico. Good posture, she noted, is always good for the spine, as is maintaining a normal weight and stretching. I spent another merry hour playing the animations of my scans over and over, pausing occasionally to take screenshots of my pelvis to send next time I am solicited for nudes, and periodically tilting my head to the right in what I hoped was a corrective manner.
I’d glimpsed inside and what I saw wasn’t life-changing, which I suppose makes me lucky. There were no spooky spots on my organs, no strange thickening in my uterus, and my brain was taut in my skull. My boobs—or, as I’ve taken to calling them, “a normal mixture of fat and heterogeneously dense glandular tissue”—may require additional screening in the future, but they looked very cool in black-and-white. I can relax. That is, once I make peace with the knowledge that my house is leaning.
Lauren Larson is an Austin, Texas–based writer and editor. Her work appears in GQ, Texas Monthly, The New York Times, and New York magazine
