The chamber of an MRI machine is a surreal environment.
Youre flat on a slab and fed into a tube.
Inside, its dark and noisy, intermittentclangsreverberating around your head.
INTERNAL AFFAIRSPeering into the black box of the body can raise further questions. Yves Klein,ANT 7 Untitled Anthropometry,1960. © Succession Yves Klein c/o Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris 2024. Art Resource, NY
Ive always attributed this chaotic banging to atoms ricocheting, doing quantum stuff, rendering the invisible visible.
Bones, organs, blood vessels exposed.
Dodgy cell clusters held up to the light for a radiologists inspection.
MRI is short for magnetic resonance imaging, so presumably magnets are involved.
I dont know how.
Im not a scientist.
I do know I find getting an MRI an existentially jarring experience.
I dont like MRIs.
Because I want to peer into the black box of my body.
Because I want to live.
Prenuvo is the best known among a generation of biotech start-ups offering preventive whole-body scans.
Surely theres no harm in giving people a Gods-eye view of their inner workings.
Thats the pitch, anyway.
How is my health?
There was no way to get a comprehensive answer, he explains.
Most care originates with a specific complaintnausea, dizziness, a weird bump, etc.
You see a doctor, and the doctor orders tests.
Separate complaints, separate doctors, and separate tests.
A new whole-body scanning technology developed by Rajpaul Attariwala, MD, PhD, seemed to fit the bill.
And I knew right away I wanted to bring that to the whole world.
Apparently, a lot of people want an answer to the question How is my health?
Deeper questions lurk behind that oneless technical, more along the lines of, Am I okay?
Or, If Ifeelokay, does that meaningfully correlate to my actual physical condition?
A spot on the liver, a spot on the kidney, a spot on the lung.
And then you have to get another test to see what that spot is.
In that case, is it good to hunt down every errant cell?
Can we really head off all degeneration and disease?
What, in the grand scheme, are we asking for from new diagnostics like Prenuvo?
When I pose this query to Smith-Bindman, her first response is a long sigh.
People are looking for a miracle, cures for cancers they may not even have, she says finally.
Theyre looking for eternal life.
For about an hour, I was pretty much just watching the show.
Anxiety set in around Yonkers.
What on earth would I find out?
Meanwhile, when I told friends Id had a Prenuvo scan, they expressed jealousy.
Are you afraid of something in particular?
I asked one notably fit pal.
Cancer, he said.
The thing is, theres no such thing as cancer.
There arecancers,as Smith-Bindman took pains to point out to me, and they come in various forms.
Some are couch-potato cancers, mostly just loafing around.
Others are fast-replicating, treatment-resistant ghouls.
Cancer, writ large, is the name we give to fear.
Still, the desireto knowis powerful.
Its a form of agency.
My Prenuvo-curious friend heard about whole-body scans on a podcastPeter AttiasDrive,maybe, he couldnt recall.
Something in the vast landscape of longevity-focused content that seems, increasingly, to be everywhere.
And then, on the other hand, it might just be another form of self-optimization hysteria.
The $23,000 Vitaeris 320 hyperbaric chamber that Kendall Jenner installed in her house.
All aim to tackle aging at the cellular level.
And theres no pill for that.
Theres no test, either, aside from going outside and glancing around.
You have to look at the whole person, says Kado.
We wish we had more control than we do.
Kado is describing me.
Im at an age where Im starting to feel like time is getting short.
Im constantly surveilling myself for signs of deteriorationmy fussy knee, the lines on my forehead.
In any case, this vigilance is new.
Until recently, my approach to my own health could best be described as emoji shrug.
A case in point.
Several years ago I noticed I was having trouble zipping up my favorite jeans.
I attributed this to menstrual bloat, at first, then to winter weight gain.
I made some diet and exercise adjustments and lost a few pounds.
Soon I couldnt zip up my jeans at all.
When I heard about Prenuvo, I thought about that fibroid.
No general anesthesia, no painful recuperation.
Also, my jeans would have fit.
I began contemplating my deductible.
I worried about finding good in-web link doctors.
The multiverse in my head expanded to include a possible future of waiting on hold with my insurer.
It makes us afraid of knowing whats going on with our bodies.
Were trying to empower people.
Lacy wants to reorient the medical system toward prevention.
And then, the question remains: Who pays for all of this?
My hope was that Id find problems I could nip in the bud.
My fear was that Id encounter a scan requiring myriad follow-ups.
Theres another way of looking at my fibroid story.
Sometimes I had health insurance, sometimes not.
Even a simple outpatient procedure might have been unaffordable.
I avoided doctors both because I felt fine and because I couldnt swing the cost.
Viewed from that angle, I cant help but wonder if were innovating solutions to the wrong problems here.
This, it turned out, was a symptom of the tumor.
My surgeon asked, Are you absolutely sure you havent had any seizures?
Because this tumor is compressing your hippocampus, and that disruption usually causes seizure.
Thats how most people find out they have brain cancer, says Schaffer.
It was just the smell thing.
Schaffer credits Prenuvo with saving her life.
If Id just gotten a mammogram, I never would have known.
Schaffers Prenuvo experience is atypical.
Perhaps its not coincidental that antiaging discourse got zeitgeist-y in the pandemics aftermath.
Perhaps were all feeling acute pressure not to get sick, and not to get old.
Which is entirely comprehensible.
That was another population targeted by COVID: the poor.
After all my fingernail chewing, that was the takeaway from my Prenuvo scan.
At no point did I feel compelled to seek further testing.
I did feel calm.
A human machine in perfect working order, with bonus points for Pilates.
The lucky among us will live long enough to get old.
Working on this story was not fun.
I am of the nature to experience illness.
I am of the nature to die.So go the first three.
Honestly, I wasnt cheered.
Thus, another scanthis one, the VISIA Complexion Analysis.
The VISIA scan preceded a facial at the Augustinus Bader outpost at The Webster, in SoHo.
The effect was fleeting.
There I was, eyes a bit sunken, jawline softened, skin a landscape of creases.
And you know what?
It didnt look so bad.
