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Several months ago, I received an invitation to undergo a detailed health assessment in east London. This medical center utilizes heart monitoring, blood work, and a voice-assisted skin analysis to evaluate patients. The company states it can spot numerous hidden heart-related and bodily process problems, determine your risk of experiencing early diabetes and identify suspect pigmented spots.

Externally, the clinic looks like a spacious transparent mausoleum. Internally, it's akin to a curved-wall wellness center with pleasant changing areas, private consultation areas and potted plants. Unfortunately, there's absence of aquatic amenities. The whole process lasts fewer than an hour, and incorporates among other things a mostly nude scan, multiple blood samples, a test for grasping power and, concluding, through quick data analysis, a physician review. The majority of clients leave with a generally good medical assessment but an eye on potential concerns. Throughout the opening period of operation, the organization states that one percent of its clients received perhaps life-preserving information, which is meaningful. The idea is that this information can then be provided to health systems, guide patients to necessary intervention and, finally, prolong lifespan.

The Screening Process

My personal encounter was very comfortable. The procedure is painless. I enjoyed moving through their pastel-walled rooms wearing their soft slippers. And I also was grateful for the relaxed experience, though that's perhaps more of a reflection on the condition of public healthcare after years of financial neglect. On the whole, 10 out 10 for the process.

Value Assessment

The important consideration is whether the value justifies the cost, which is trickier to evaluate. This is because there is no benchmark, and because a glowing review from me would rely on whether it detected issues – under those circumstances I'd possibly become less concerned with giving it five stars. It's also worth pointing out that it doesn't include radiographs, MRIs or body imaging, so can solely identify blood abnormalities and cutaneous tumors. People in my family history have been riddled with cancers, and while I was comforted that none of my moles look untoward, all I can do now is live my life waiting for an unwanted growth.

Medical Service Considerations

The issue regarding a dual-level healthcare that begins with a paid assessment is that the onus then rests with you, and the government medical care, which is potentially left to do the complex process of treatment. Healthcare professionals have observed that such screenings are higher-tech, and include additional testing, compared with conventional assessments which assess people in the age group of 40 and 74.

Proactive aesthetics is based on the ambient terror that one day we will look as old as we actually are.

Nevertheless, specialists have commented that "managing the quick progress in private medical assessments will be challenging for public healthcare and it is essential that these assessments add value to individual wellness and do not create supplementary tasks – or client concern – without definite advantages". Though I imagine some of the facility's clients will have additional paid health plans tucked into their wallets.

Broader Context

Timely identification is vital to treat significant conditions such as cancer, so the attraction of screening is clear. But these scans connect with something more profound, an iteration of something you see among specific demographics, that self-important segment who sincerely think they can extend life indefinitely.

The facility did not invent our focus on life extension, just as it's not news that affluent persons have longer lifespans. Some of them even appear more youthful, too. Cosmetics companies had been combating the passage of time for hundreds of years before modern interventions. Proactive care is just a contemporary method of describing it, and paid-for proactive medicine is a natural evolution of preventive beauty products.

In addition to aesthetic jargon such as "extended youth" and "preventive aesthetics", the goal of proactive care is not preventing or reversing time, words with which advertising authorities have expressed concern. It's about postponing it. It's indicative of the lengths we'll go to meet impossible standards – another stick that women used to beat ourselves with, as if the obligation is ours. The business of preventive beauty appears as almost sceptical of age prevention – specifically facelifts and tweakments, which seem undignified compared with a skin product. Yet both are based in the pervasive anxiety that one day we will appear our age as we actually are.

Personal Reflections

I've tried a lot of such products. I like the process. Furthermore, I believe certain products enhance my complexion. But they don't surpass a proper rest, inherited traits or adopting a relaxed approach. Nonetheless, these are solutions to something beyond your control. Regardless of how strongly you embrace the perspective that maturing is "a perceptual issue rather than of 'real life'", the world – and cosmetics companies – will persist in implying that you are aged as soon as you are not young.

On paper, such screenings and their like are not concerned with avoiding mortality – that would be ridiculous. And the benefits of timely detection on your health is evidently a distinct consideration than preventive action on your aging signs. But ultimately – screenings, treatments, whatever – it is all a battle with biological processes, just tackled in distinct approaches. After investigating and exploited every inch of our planet, we are now seeking to master our physical beings, to transcend human limitations. {