Prenuvo MRI: When Marketing Becomes Dangerous Medical Advice

I did a video about Prenuvo MRI a while ago sharing my thoughts on why I'm not a fan of that business model. Since then, my comments have been infiltrated by bot accounts — and something even more concerning.

If you've never had this happen to your posts, it's always really obvious. You get a whole slew of comments all at once from accounts with:

• Zero followers, zero following
• Posts that are just random words or pictures of fields and pets
• Comments that all say nearly identical things with the same grammar and verbiage

These bot comments all said variations of the same thing: "This is a great opportunity for patients to take control of their healthcare" and "You can find cancers before your doctor can."

In addition to the obvious bots, there were multiple comments from health-related micro-creators that were nearly identical to each other. All of them were people with real health problems — a woman with renal cell carcinoma, another patient with an autoimmune disease — saying they were abandoning their doctor's treatment plan in favor of Prenuvo for follow-up care.

This is deeply problematic.

For the patient with renal cell carcinoma: the proper follow-up imaging is not a non-contrast MRI. For a cancer patient to suggest that other cancer patients go somewhere like Prenuvo instead of their oncologist is genuinely harmful.

One commenter claimed to have BRCA and said she was going to stop getting her scheduled mammography, ultrasound, and contrast MRIs with her doctor — and go to Prenuvo instead. That is the absolute wrong thing to do. BRCA patients need specific, targeted screening protocols, not a general whole-body scan.

Because the verbiage across all of these comments — both the bots and the health influencer accounts — is so similar, it's really hard to believe these people aren't somehow being influenced or encouraged.

I would really hope that Prenuvo is not behind this, because that would be gross behavior. Encouraging patients to abandon proper medical follow-up for a screening tool that was never designed to replace specialist care is dangerous.

Your cancer follow-up, your BRCA screening, your specialist imaging — these should always be directed by your doctor. A non-contrast whole-body MRI is not a substitute for targeted, protocol-driven medical imaging.