(Via Bioethics.net) Using whole body scans (CAT or MRI) to screen healthy, asymptomatic patients for cancer or other diseases has not been shown to save lives, is very expensive, often leads to many false positive results that cause unnecessary anxiety on the part of the patient and lead to more unnecessary, expensive, and often invasive and risky testing, and in the case of CAT scans, exposes a perfectly healthy patient to as much radiation as they would normally get in three years. In short, these scans are highly unlikely to be beneficial to any single patient.

The companies that provide and promote these scans know the facts exactly as I stated above; These scans do not save lives and are a waste of money and potentially harmful. So they must resort to misleading advertising in order to draw in customers. A recent study by Stanford researchers looked at the ads and information these companies provide to the public and confirms just how misleading these ads can be.

Almost none of the ads and brochures referred consumers to outside sources of information, such as a primary care physician, and the risks of having a scan were seldom mentioned. “Many contained messages conveying a false sense of reassurance, and some conveyed fear,” the authors write.

The marketing pieces fail to mention that the benefits of screening healthy individuals have not yet been established by clinical trials, and 25 percent of ads stated the technology was FDA-approved. In fact, the FDA states clearly that it “has never approved CT for screening any part of the body for any specific disease, let alone for screening the whole body when there are no specific symptoms of disease at all.”

The authors point out that part of the problem is that the FDA does not require advertisers of diagnostic tests to follow the same guidelines as those required for prescription medications.

The FDA requires advertising for prescription drugs to refer patients to secondary sources of information, to encourage them to seek the advice of a health-care provider, and to provide balanced information on the associated benefits and risks. Currently, no such requirement applies to the scanning industry; it has “fallen through regulatory cracks,” according to the study.

It was extremely easy to show what the study authors were talking about. Using a simple Google search I found the web site VitalBodyScan.com which makes the same claims about “early detection” of many ailments. Nowhere in this web site do they recommend that you consult with your physician before forking out the money to undergo the scan nor do they list any of the potential risks or shortcomings of these scans. Then they make the following highly questionable claim;

“Full Body screening is an effective early detection method for the screening of many major diseases, including heart disease and cancer.”

Exactly what do they mean by “effective“? VitalBodyScan.com does not provide any references nor any documentation to support and explain what they mean by “effective” and so this becomes just a meaningless advertising word (like “all natural”). The term is misleading because what they really mean is that these scans can effectively detect abnormalities but what they don’t tell you is that these scans are anything but “effective screening” tests. The FDA’s own website with information on whole body scanning gives this warning to patients that appears to directly contradict VitalBodyScan.com’s claims of effectiveness.

“At this time the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knows of no scientific evidence demonstrating that whole-body scanning of individuals without symptoms provides more benefit than harm to people being screened.”

Obviously the FDA is aware of this problem but apparently lacks either the regulatory ability or the political willpower to beef up their oversight of the diagnostic testing industry. Yet considering how scary successful their regulation of direct to consumer prescription drug advertising (DTC) has been, maybe it would be better if we consider a total ban on all DTC advertising of any prescription drug, medical device, or diagnostic tests.

Or maybe (for those libertarians out there) the FDA can find some gonads and tell these whole body scanning companies, “If you want to advertise then you need to say directly on any ad that ‘There is no scientific evidence that whole body scans are an effective screening test for any illness in patients who are otherwise healthy and with few risk factors for such illnesses‘.” In my opinion, every physician as well as the FDA has an ethical obligation to protect the general public from treatments and/or tests that will not provide them any benefit and may cause harm . . i.e. quackery.