From: The American Institute of Physics

College Park, MD -- Medical entrepreneurs have been aggressively marketing whole-body scans by promising preventive medicine and implying peace of mind. But experts in medical radiation say there are no scientifically demonstrated benefits of the scans and many reasons to avoid them.

In the past few years, people with money and general concerns about their health--a group that some have coined the "worried wealthy"--have been shelling out hundreds of dollars or more for the whole-body scan, which is also advertised as the "full body" or "total body" scan. In the procedure, customers get a 3-D x-ray--or "CT scan"--of the body, typically from the pelvis to the neck (head scans usually sold separately). Whole-body CT scans, promise the ads, can reveal hidden medical problems that doctors can treat early.
Experts skeptical

But more and more medical and scientific organizations are raising doubts about the procedure. A group with expertise in the physics of medical radiation--the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM)--is the latest to speak out.

"It's not a question of 'Can I afford this?' but instead 'Do I really need it?'" says Robert Gould, president of the AAPM and a professor of radiology at the University of California at San Francisco. "You have to have a better criterion than the color of your credit card," he adds.

"The procedure does carry a certain risk," Gould says, "and we're not dealing with a trivial amount of radiation. There's no demonstrable benefit from receiving that amount of radiation."

Fishing for problems before there are symptoms

By speaking out on whole-body scans, the medical physicists of AAPM are joining ranks with the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Radiology, and state agencies in Pennsylvania and Texas. In a statement, AAPM says that total-body scanning is "not scientifically justified" for patients without symptoms.

According to the authors of the statement, no scientific data shows whole-body scanning to be effective in detecting disease. According to the AAPM experts, CT scans are best for obtaining information on known or physician-suspected problems, like a head injury or a previously detected cancer, rather than search healthy patients for unknown diseases.

More risk than reward

With no scientifically documented benefits, whole-body scans have many potential drawbacks and even some risks, medical physicists say. These include:

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