Feb. 11, 2026Updated Feb. 12, 2026, 9:00 a.m. ET
Picture this: At your annual physical with your primary care provider, you also receive a full-body scan and a more extensive panel of bloodwork. Just to make sure that you are 100% fine, nothing is wrong with you, you can go on your way and not worry a second longer about your health. Or if there is something, even tiny, now you can fix it before it gets worse.
Sounds perfect, right? That's a future many envision thanks to a health and wellness longevity culture brimming with innovation aimed at keeping us healthier for longer.
"Sometimes, even if we have a great lifestyle, it's important to get a baseline, because we don't really understand," says Andrew Lacy, founder and CEO of full-body MRI company Prenuvo. "Everyone's genetics are unique. And some people can be fit and have liver problems or fit and have sort of inflammatory bowel problems. And knowing this is just really helpful."
As exciting as it seems, others in the medical community are skeptical – particularly about full-body MRIs. Dr. Manjiri Dighe, Professor of Radiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, says that "whole body MRI is in its clinical infancy. While it is non-invasive and highly sensitive, it lacks the large-scale longitudinal data needed to prove that it saves more lives than it complicates through overdiagnosis." With low availability and high cost, for the average person, it remains a luxury item not an "evidence-based medical necessity." The tests range from several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on which sections of the body are scanned, and are not covered by insurance.
Research shows these test often find something, but much less often find actual disease. One study in 2020 found that 95% of asymptomatic patients had some type of "abnormal" finding, but just 1.8% of these findings were indeed cancer. Research has varied on just how many incidental findings occur from these tests.
Prenuvo's recent Polaris Study followed 1,011 patients for at least one year following a whole-body MRI scan. Of these patients, 41 had biopsies. More than half of the 41 were diagnosed with cancer. Of these cancers, 68% didn't have targeted screening tests and 64% were localized when detected. The company says it finds possibly life-threatening conditions in 1 in 20 people.
What's the average person to do?
Full-body MRI results 'all about context'
Dr. Daniel Sodickson, chief medical scientist at Function and adjunct professor in the Department of Radiology at New York University, has been working on MRI and other imaging technology for nearly 30 years. Over the last five to 10 years, he began asking himself more and more: Why do these remarkable machines he and his colleagues devoted their lives to building and improving only help patients when they're sick?
"They're remarkable tools to guide therapy, to diagnose and so on," he says. "But by and large, we use them after people have had symptoms or some other signs of disease, and in too many cases, it's too late."
He shifted his thinking to focus more on proactive medicine, and he began advising MRI company Ezra (later acquired by Function, where he now works full-time). At Function, in addition to preventative, full-body MRI screening to detect early stage cancers, aneurysms and abnormalities, patients can also seek out extensive panels of blood tests to interpret all their results with proper perspective.
"It's all about context," he says. "And I think that's what addresses a lot of the concerns about false positive rates and downstream tests." That's where a lot of criticism comes for preventative testing. How often are you performing unnecessary tests on low-risk individuals, when whatever you find wouldn't have developed into anything serious? And how much is that costing someone financially and emotionally over time?
Fear of 'missing something' often feels bigger than actual risk
Andrew Vickers, attending research methodologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, knows some people will find real problems with whole-body MRIs. But is there evidence to show it's doing more harm than good? "You're finding something that never would have caused you any problem in your life, and in cancer, we call that overdiagnosis," Vickers says. The harder we look for cancers, the more we will over-diagnose them. And if someone is over-diagnosed, gets a biopsy and develops an infection, that's a direct harm.
"These unnecessary additional exams and treatments would further burden our healthcare system, which is already overburdened," Dighe adds. "For the general asymptomatic population, the statistical probability of a false positive is significantly higher than the probability of finding a curable, life-threatening cancer."
Humans crave reassurance. And when social media algorithms feed that reassurance, it's easy to see why these tests seem smart to try.
More than 87% of influencer posts on social media about such tests (including full-body MRI, multi-cancer early detection tests and more) offered a positive spin, according to a JAMA study published in February 2025; about 84% were overt promotions.
A closer look at numbers shows "the confirmed cancer detection rate is approximately 1.6% in general screening populations, with 11% receiving treatment triggered by whole-body MRI findings when including both malignant and benign conditions requiring intervention," says Dr. Mina S. Makary, associate professor of radiology at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, referencing a 2025 European Radiology study. "The fear of 'missing something' often feels larger than the actual statistical risk," Makary adds. "Also, we need to recognize that false reassurance is possible. A negative scan doesn’t mean you’re disease-free. Some cancers and conditions simply aren’t visible yet or aren’t reliably detected on a one-time full-body MRI."
Lacy argues the test "just gives you so much runway and options to affect the trajectory of that disease" if you indeed have something in an early stage. He remembers giving away a free scan at a hospital, the winner a 38-year-old nurse. The machine found lung cancer. She had never smoked.
In medicine, more information not always better
Sodickson envisions a future where we will monitor our health through blood tests, imaging and wearables even more closely. An early warning system built in that tells us what's wrong before our symptoms do. For now, he doesn't recommend getting a scan "then trying to scramble and make sense of all the data yourselves. What's important to think about is making this more of a repeating habit." Ideally, costs will continue to go down over time for this kind of testing. Insurance may cover them someday.
"Most of those things that could be anxiety-provoking go away or are much less concerning, if you get a second scan and you see that things aren't changed," he adds. "So most of the anxiety someone lives with can be dealt with by just getting another time point and seeing a trend rather than seeing a snapshot."
These tests also serve as warning signs for less serious but still concerning conditions like spinal degeneration. "Just being able to tell someone in their 20s, hey, you got to watch out here, because, you shouldn't really have this level of degeneration at your age," Lacy says, forces them to watch their posture and pay attention.
Sodickson has had many MRIs in his life, including Ezra scans and a Function blood test. Surprises awaited him, too. But "I feel like I actually have someone looking out for me now, rather than just blindly going through my life and maybe one day waking up with with a disease I never knew I had a susceptibility to."
While these tests could be life-saving for those with certain conditions, for many clinicians to widely recommend them, they'd want to see cost-effectiveness and a true mortality benefit, Dighe says. "In medicine, 'more information' is not always 'better information.'"
Lacy is betting on the future. "The health system can and will adapt to early detection, and I think it's sad to suggest the alternative, which is we don't know how to handle this, and we're not sure we can adapt, and therefore we shouldn't allow patients to have more information about their health."
No matter what you decide for yourself, consult a licensed medical professional for advice.