Full-body MRI looks for cancer

Early detection is the key to successfully treating many diseases.

Science is getting so good at it that it’s sometimes possible to cure cancer before you have the first symptom.

When Chris Botting’s wife Jennifer bought an advanced health screening session, he never imagined what a gift it was.

“I had no idea that I was dealing with kidney cancer at all; had showed no signs,” Chris said.

Chris was totally asymptomatic, but a full-body MRI picked up something growing inside him: a cancer that could’ve cost him his life.

“The size of the tumor in my left kidney was more than half the size of my kidney, so it was a large, large mass. It was, I believe, six and a half centimeters. I think the usual size of a kidney is about 10 centimeters,” Botting said.

The technology is out there, but it’s mostly used on people with a known or suspected condition. It’s a relatively new idea to layer advanced screening and move it to the front end of the healthcare curve.

That’s the foundational concept behind Fountain Life in Naples, founded by Dr. William Kapp in the belief we could all be a whole lot healthier if we saw trouble coming.

“80% of what we’re treating today is chronic disease, and it’s not symptomatic ’til late stage,” Kapp said.

This MRI is one of their most powerful tools.

“We do whole-body MRI with some special imaging technology that allows us to see very small areas that could potentially be cancerous, and when they actually light up on the scans or specific type of MRI scan, then we have a high propensity belief that there is a cancer there,” Kapp said.

It detected Chris’s kidney cancer. A large tumor was caught and removed before it spread.

“In his case, he doesn’t eat chemotherapy; he doesn’t eat radiation, and he’s cured,” Kapp said.

He lost a kidney, but Chris was spared a life-threatening disease and treatment.

“I really was given a second chance,” he said.

Fountain Life is based in Naples but is expanding to more locations.

It offers dozens of screening methods for various diseases and conditions, but it does not come cheap. A day-long session costs around $10,000.