Standing in a futuristic clinic in central Manchester, dressed in a gown and rubber slippers, it feels less like a medical appointment and more like a scene from a science fiction movie. As seventy cameras fire simultaneously under the guidance of a robotic voice, thousands of images are captured to create an AI powered 3D avatar of the body. This is the world of the full body MOT, a booming industry where companies like Neko Health, Prenuvo, and Ezra are attracting millions in investment by promising to catch diseases before symptoms ever appear. For some, like thirty three year old Mehvish, these scans are life saving tools; her experience led to an urgent diagnosis of LADA, a rare form of autoimmune diabetes that might have otherwise gone undetected.
The appeal is obvious: why wait for illness to strike when you can proactively screen for everything from skin cancer and cardiovascular disease to kidney disorders? Hjalmar Nilsonne, a founder of Neko Health, argues that modern primary care remains too basic and that shifting toward prevention is logically superior to treating established cures. With waiting lists stretching to one hundred thousand people and prices ranging from several hundred to thousands of pounds, there is clearly a massive public appetite for taking control of one’s health through high tech surveillance.
However, not everyone is convinced that these digital check ups are the panacea they claim to be. Some patients have found the technology fallible. Annabel Mason Thompson recalls how the AI scanner completely missed four cancerous lesions on her skin, which were only identified because she manually pointed out a suspicious mark to a clinician during her consultation. This highlights a critical tension between automated efficiency and human expertise, suggesting that while the data points are impressive, they aren’t always foolproof.
Beyond individual errors lies a broader systemic concern shared by many medical professionals. Professor Victoria Tzortziou Brown of the Royal College of GPs warns that there is little convincing evidence that these broad screenings actually improve overall health outcomes for healthy patients. Instead, NHS England fears that this trend creates a cycle of over diagnosis and avoidable anxiety. When private scans flag insignificantly abnormal results, patients often flood back into the already strained public health system demanding urgent follow up tests and specialist consultations for issues that may never have caused them harm in the first place.
