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There’s no better endorsement of a product than when it’s used by the president of the United States. When President Obama had his annual physical earlier this year, he was given a virtual colonoscopy on a CT scanner. The noninvasive procedure, the results of which were not made public, offers a high-tech solution to personal health-care needs.
Carl and Judy Gerhardt recently underwent similar medical body scans in Clarkston. The reason: Judy’s family has a history of heart disease and cancer, and the couple figured it would be a good investment to find out whether their doctor could detect any risks.
“We liked the idea of just having the security, so to speak, of knowing that we don’t have anything happening,” Carl says. “You hear these things all the time [about] people who are allegedly healthy and do the right things, then keel over dead with a stroke or a heart attack.”
The Gerhardts, who live in Milford, had ARC scans of their regular heart arteries and their carotid arteries, which cost a little extra but gave them added reassurance.
The couple understood that they would have to pay for the procedure out of their own pockets ($300 per scan) since, like most health-insurance policies, theirs doesn’t cover the service. But they saw it as a reasonable investment, considering the potential costs of suffering a problem they hadn’t anticipated.
For Carl, 66, and Judy, 63, the scans showed nothing unusual. They will most likely wait another five years before they go through the procedure again.
Still, the Gerhardts find it curious that most general practitioners don’t recommend that their patients get the scans done. (Doctors generally attribute that fact to the lack of insurance coverage for the procedure.)
With clean reports in hand, the Gerhardts say they’ll continue to be careful — if not fanatical — about maintaining good health habits. And they won’t have to waste time and energy worrying unnecessarily.
“It’s been a positive thing, and something of a comfort,” Carl says. “So if I want to have a big cheeseburger once in awhile, I’m not going to worry about it.”
The risk of developing serious medical conditions led to the widespread appearance a decade ago of early warning or “body scan” centers. Using state-of-the-art scan equipment, the centers were established to take images of patients’ internal organs, in an effort to detect unusually high levels of calcium and other potential problems that might create a higher-than-normal risk.
While the technology is no substitute for a traditional checkup, and its practitioners make no claim that it can uncover every conceivable problem, it does offer the ability to look inside the body and detect potential risks that more traditional measures can’t immediately spot.
At Associated Radiologists of Clarkston, where the Gerhardts had their procedures performed, Dr. Marc Kahn sits down with as many as three patients a day to explain the meaning of their scan results and to recommend the next steps, if any. A printed report, along with a CD containing the scan images, are provided to patients, so they can take them to their primary physicians to discuss what treatment might be needed. “For most of the population,” Kahn says, “the first sign of heart disease is death.”
Associated Radiologists and other scan providers haven’t experienced the kind of market many were expecting when the technology first became viable in 2000. At that time, it was widely anticipated that health insurers would readily reimburse their subscribers for taking such a proactive measure intended to help prevent heart attacks.
But the insurance companies decided otherwise.
“They don’t want to pay for something that has potential mass use,” Kahn says. He’s frustrated by the insurance industry’s position, but he’s realistic about the likelihood of it changing anytime soon. That’s one reason why body scanning only accounts for about 10 percent of what Kahn’s practice does — and why many others who provided the service in metro Detroit have come and gone.
“Ten years ago, when this all got started, it was insane,” Kahn says. “There was so much misunderstanding about what this was about and what this was going to do. Most people didn’t understand what the point of it was. Cardiologists didn’t like it because [they thought] other disciplines were [muscling] in on their action — which was hardly the case. But there was so much misinformation. And then, when everyone did an about-face and didn’t reimburse, if you wanted to stay in business you had to ask people to pay money out of their own pockets.”
Since then, Kahn says, the industry has faced the perception that the service must not be legitimate, because insurance companies won’t pay for it.
Perhaps the best example of a come-and-go center was the Auburn Hills-based Early Warning Healthcare Institute, which opened in May 2002 under the direction of Dr. Donald Bronn. Using Electron Beam Tomography connected to superfast computers that analyzed imagery, Early Warning looked to provide crucial, potentially live-saving information to thousands who might otherwise have no idea of the risks they faced.
Bronn, who now operates out of an office in Bloomfield Hills, says the closure of Early Warning was a bow to business reality — and also to his belief that body scanning may be rendered obsolete by the emerging practice of genetic profiling.
“We’re now moving from imaging to presumption medicine,” Bronn says. “There’s been such an explosion in the last five years of genetic information that we don’t need to scan people. We can do genetic testing. That’s probably going to be the future direction, in that you’re concentrating on an individual. If there’s a history of heart disease, you’d want to get a genetic profile to see if you’ve carried on the bad genes.”
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