Full Body MRI: Detect Cancer Early

Foreign. Here with Ryan, and we're talking about full body MRI screening. My main interest is screening for cancer, but I just want to give a little preamble. So we think about longevity and a lot of things, people are doing a lot of things, try to live a little bit longer, but one of them is not to die of anything that is totally preventable. And I think about cardiovascular disease, which we can pick up a decade in advance. Neurocognitive decline like Alzheimer's, you can pick up 20 years in advance. Even cancers, we want to pick those in the earliest stages. Right now, if you do your regular insurance covered cancer screening, you're going to pick up about one out of four cancers before they're clinically significant. Ryan is with bionic MRI and they're doing full body mri, which is different than the MRI you get in the hospital because it's actually taking larger cuts, so it can be done in a reasonable time frame. The pickup tumor is about the size of a peanut butter, which is a point where they can be removed. When I talk about how long your company's been doing this, Ryan, and yeah.

So thanks for having me, Dr. Mok. So bionic Body screening was really founded by my father, Dr. Ringgold, the late Dr. Ringgold. And it was a center that he had for several years, you know, 13, 14 years, that focused more on regular injuries, auto accidents, sports injuries. And one day he came into work and he got shorter, he was short of breath. And he went to the hospital to discover that he had stage 4 non Hodgkin's lymphoma with hundreds of tumors spread throughout his chest and abdomen, some as large as 5 inches in size. And he went through some very difficult treatments, put it into remission, came back to his brain a year later, put that into remission. But during this time, he started hearing about these full body MRI screenings happening in Canada and in California. And it really became a passion of his to convert his MRI center into something that was helping people detect things like cancer much, much earlier so that they could avoid the type of journey that he had gone down with his treatments. You know, he was left with debilitating side effects, nerve damage, cognitive damage from the aggressive chemotherapy. So we bionic, they started offering these full body screenings probably, probably almost two years ago, but there was not a whole lot of awareness about it. He passed away with complications from pneumonia last summer. And I came on board to keep his legacy alive and to see his dream stay alive. He really wanted the people of Michigan, the families of Michigan, to have access to this type of screening. And so I came on board late September and try to really raise the awareness of our screenings. So you know, he started it probably almost two years ago. But we're really just kind of getting our name out there right now, if that makes sense.

To put in perspective for our audience is you are the only whole body MRI screening center in the state of Michigan. I've been sending my patients out to San Diego, down to Florida to get this done and now they're doing cell field. And MRI is a little bit more expensive in Michigan than other states. And that's because there's a government controlled monopoly that we have unique in Michigan. It makes things more costly. And you're talking about giving a discount to patients that have, that are patients of allure is really making this to let our lower patients know. I've got my MRI done insure center. So some of my employees and thankfully there's no cancers. And interesting. I did a few years ago in San Diego. It cost me 5,000. I got some other stuff with that and I will cyst on my liver and some little anomalies that are unchanged. I got these little things called FLIR signals in my brain that are benign and they're unchanged. That's good to know that that stuff's all good and there's no cancers. And what's, what's the cost and what kind of discount are you giving us, our patients rather.

So the regular fee for the full body MRI screening is 29.50 and anybody that is comes through Allure gets a $250 discount.

They just got to tell them that they were a patient of ours.

Yeah. So they just have to let us know that they're your patient. And it automatically will knock $250 off of, off of that screening fee.

Yeah. Sometimes I hear people say, I don't want to know. Well, if you have cancer, you're going to find out. You might find out the hard way. So it is scary thinking about these things. But we do things like mammograms, colonoscopies, Pap smears, PSA blood tests. We do things that are looking for stuff before it's serious again. All those screening tests only pick up about one out of four cancers before they're clinically significant. MRI does not get it to 100%, gets much closer. So we can look at. There's other things called a liquid biopsy that I'll talk about in other podcasts that can help as well. But the next step is full body MRI again, less than $3,000. And I did it. You have a big machine. So I've been in MRI before. You felt like you're in a coffin. Yours is much larger. And I did not feel claustrophobic.

Yeah, this is. They call it a wide bore. So it's still a tube like people would think of, but it's open on both ends. Right. It's not the hamburger. It's like a hamburger bun that's open with no sides. It's still a two, but it. But it's open on the end of your feet, open on the end of your head. And it's a wide bore. So it's 70 centimeters. So it really does create a lot more space compared to a traditional mri. So people who traditionally would feel very claustrophobic in the traditional sized MRI seem to do a lot better with the wide bore.

My recall is about an hour, 10 minutes or so.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's right. About 70 minutes is what it takes for most people. You know, there's a couple breath holds that they go through. If you remember doing the breath holds, you know, but. And it makes some loud noises and it moves back and forth a little bit. And everybody is different. Some people, you know, feel so relaxed that they actually start dozing off like I did. I started dozing off a couple different times. And if you remember, we give the option to listen to some music. I don't think you did the music, Dr. Mok, but I think your employee did. Did. And that seems to help people kind of just relax. And it goes by pretty quickly. Didn't you feel like it went by kind of fast?

Yeah, I fell asleep too. So I was kind of surprised, I think that it is so loud, it kind of allowed me to sleep. And then what was nice too is I got a follow up call in about two weeks by the nurse practitioner. She went over everything that's shown. I got the report, they sent me that they sent me the disc. Guess I want to take that to my doctor. And then the mri, the nurse went over that MRI report, which is important that you have somebody's really familiar with these because, you know, again, in my case, I have a cyst on my liver that I had five years ago. And it's benign. And if I went to say this, you know, the family practice, he might send me a surgeon might take that thing out, which is benign. So you have to have somebody that understands that there's normal things. We call them incidental omas, things that are incidental, that are things that we don't need to worry about. It's good to know that. But really looking for aneurysms. They even saw some degenerative arthritis. I have a little bit of degenerative disease in my spine. Not bad. So I was good to know it's not bad. And they saw some little lesions in my brain that are benign. I've had them for years that are just spots. So I know that's my baseline still seeing that there was not alarming. And then if there was something there that was new, well, then I know I have to take intervention. So my recommendation is that you start this around 45, and then if it's clear and you have low risk, you do it again at five years. Once you get over 50, you might do it every two years and have over 60 about every year. If you have a family history of cancer, certain cancer like pancreatic or ovarian or sarcomas, I might just start screening a little sooner. And unlike a CAT scan, there's no ionizing radiation with mri. In fact, in other words, there are no known adverse events to doing an MRI every year other than the course cost.

And a lot of people still get MRI confused with CAT scans, so they're surprised when they find out that there's no radiation. They say, oh, I heard that MRI is like a thousand X rays. There's zero radiation with an mri. So like you said, you can do it as often as you want with no risk of being exposed to levels of any level of radiation. And you did touch on it, Dr. Moka, a little bit earlier. You know, people often will ask us, they say, oh, I don't want to do a mammogram. Can this replace it? Or I don't want to do a colonoscopy. Can this replace it? Absolutely not. This does not replace it. This is a. This is a tool. In addition, in addition to any type of regular preventative screenings that are being ordered by their physician, any yearly screenings that they're already doing, this, this full body MRI does not replace your routine preventative screenings that you're doing. But it just. It's another tool to add.

Yeah, that's a great point. Let's go over that briefly. So if you've had a smoker, you're entitled by the Affordable Healthcare act to get a CAT scan in your chest looking for cancer. And a CAT scan of the chest may be theoretically more sensitive for lung cancer than mri. So that'd be one advantage. Colonoscopy, theoretically, you'd pick up a tumor on mri, but it's probably a little bit bigger because the colon is kind of a hollow organ. So a colonoscopy or the cologuard, fecal tests are more appropriate. Mammogram for breast cancer or other similar services are going to be more sensitive. A skin exam by your doctor, your dermatologist, looking for skin cancer, this is looking for epithelial and solid based tumors that we do not have any screening tests for. Examples would be brain cancer, pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, sarcomas, which are cancer of the bone and the soft tissues, ovarian cancer, that's even uterine cancer. But there's other tests for that. So these, these are for cancers that are in renal cancers, kidney cancers, These are for cancers. There is no screening test for that because we have no screening test for. They don't routinely screen for, screen and screen them with mri. Now, if you just went to the hospital and said, I want to have a full body mri, they really want to offer it to you. It's got to be some medical necessity. And what they're doing at a hospital based mri, you know there's something wrong and they're doing a really deep dive into that organ to see where it's at, how big it is. This MRI is a little less sensitive. In other words, it's not taking so much detail. So we can get it done in an hour and 10 minutes. And if there's an abnormality, then you go and do a more formalized MRI on that specific organization to see how big it is and where it's at, what needs to be done about it. So thanks for talking, Ryan. And we're going to send this out to our customers and our patients. And I just want to take our team and our community on the journey of we're looking at a lot of times the lower side of is making helping people look better on the outside. Our customers also want to look better on the inside. And I'm trying to set a good example by taking care of myself and my staff and our team. And we do things to help our staff be healthy. And part of it is screening people for cancer before it happens, screening people for heart disease before it happens, and screening people for neurocognitive decline before it happens. That's where we can intervene at the very, very early stage. So thanks so much.

I appreciate it. Thank you.