A 35-year-old New York City man paid about $2,500 for a whole body magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan that came up healthy — but then suffered a massive stroke less than a year later that the expensive procedure flagged no sign of, The Washington Post reports.
Now the stroke victim, Sean Clifford, is suing the MRI company behind the scan, Prenuvo — which has been endorsed by celebrities ranging from Paris Hilton to Cindy Crawford — for missing in the scans that 6o percent of his proximal right middle cerebral artery, a common site for strokes, had narrowed and showed “irregularity.”
Clifford, who suffered a stroke in the same area where the blockage was missed by Prenuvo, is now paralyzed on his left side and permanently disabled — throwing into high relief that these scans, which prey on people’s fears, aren’t exactly fool proof-despite extravagant claims that they can pick up anything from tumors to brain aneurysms.
A judge approved for the lawsuit, which was filed in September 2024, to proceed last month, according to WaPo. A statement from Prenuvo to the newspaper stated that “we take any allegation seriously and are committed to addressing it through the appropriate legal process. Our focus remains on delivering safe, high quality, proactive care to the patients who place their trust in us every day.”
Full body scans are controversial in the medical field because some doctors think they pick up details that could be false alarms that send patients down a rabbithole of expensive and unnecessary testing, according to WaPo — or, as in Clifford’s case, the scans can miss glaring signs of danger. Most conventional doctors instead use MRIs to focus on one area of the body that’s giving patients trouble.
Mirza Rahman, a physician and ex-president of the American College of Preventive Medicine, told WaPo that the problem with these scans is that they give people a “false sense of reassurance.”
“Do the radiologists have sufficient time to carefully look at the bones, the vessels, the organs, and all the other information that is generated by such scans?” Rahman said. “That is a question that needs to be answered.”
More on MRI scans: MRI Scans Causing Nasty Material to Form Inside Body, Scientists Find
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