London's most sought-after health test revealed everything wrong with my body - but did I need to know?
After going through an unassuming glass door and down a flight of brightly lit stairs in London's exclusive Marylebone Village, I found myself strapped to a plethora of monitors, measuring my heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, heart sounds and more.
This came after my blood was taken, my eye pressure had been tested and I'd stood in a blindingly bright chamber in just my knickers, with the bright lights assessing every single marking on my body in less than a minute.
What in the Black Mirror is going on? I hear you ask. Let me explain.
I'd booked in for the sought-after Neko Health Scan, the £299 body scan with a 20,000-person waitlist. Such is the demand for the assessment, Neko is soon set to open a second outpost in London's Liverpool Street to meet the appetite of our capital's health-conscious residents.
What is the Neko Health Scan?
Stepping into the Neko clinic feels like what I imagined the future would be like in the year 2000. It's a rabbit warren of corridors, with doors and chambers interconnecting to allow doctors and specialists to appear as if from nowhere - like when the wizard is revealed in The Wizard of Oz.
Magic appearances aside, the Neko Health Scan, which began in Stockholm and was co-founded by Spotify's creator Daniel Ek, maps millions of health data points across your body - both inside and out - in just a few minutes.
The high-tech scan checks moles across the body, risk factors for stroke and heart attack, along with blood fats and blood sugar levels – all in a 30-minute appointment.
Explaining the concept, co-founder Hjalmar Nilsonne says: "In the UK, you are required to do an MOT on your car. However, when it comes to your body, you often need to break down before seeing a doctor.
"Our healthcare systems were designed decades ago, they haven't kept pace with rising costs or demand - a trend that we collectively need to find a way to reverse. To bend the cost curve of healthcare, we need to shift towards proactive, preventive care."
"In the UK, you're required to do an MOT on your car. But when it comes to your body, you often need to break down before seeing a doctor"
What happens during a Neko Health Scan?
Step 1: Full body scan
You step into a cylinder in your underwear and thousands of photos are taken, front and back.
Step 2: More body scanning
You lie on a bed with ECG monitors and blood pressure trackers attached, while lasers scan you too.
Step 3: Blood test
As you lie on the bed, your medical specialist takes your blood, which they then immediately send to an unseen doctor, via a whizzy tube – very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The mystery doctor (who you meet later) analyses your blood while you…
4. Step 4: Test your grip strength
This is an indicator of your overall strength, the specialist tells me.
5. Step 5: Test your eye pressure
This is like the test you have with your optician – they puff air into your eyes – perhaps my least favourite element of the whole procedure.
After all of this is complete, the mysterious doctor appears via a sliding wall (I told you it felt magical) and does an in-depth scan of your body, looking at various markings to check for skin cancer and other abnormalities.
Next, the doctor guides you to a treatment room to sit down and go through your results.
The Neko Health Scan results
Despite having so much to cover, the consultation feels unrushed, with my doctor talking me through every element of my health.
The doctor showed my results in comparison to other Neko clients, explaining that people who booked in for the test are typically at the peak of health. These are not sickly people looking for diagnoses. They are the fittest, most health-conscious out there - hence why tracking and monitoring their wellness is important. It's a case of staying well, rather than waiting for something to go wrong.
This leads me to my results - I'm happy to report I'm well overall (handy, given that I work in wellness...) but my doctor did note that my cholesterol is verging towards the higher end of what's ideal for someone my age.
With the mindset that Neko is there to be preventative, I found this to be the most useful thing – knowing that while I'm fine now, there are steps to take to look after my future health.
My doctor also noted that my grip strength is low, meaning my overall strength needs some work.
Working in wellness, I am often given completely impractical advice after consultations, with various experts recommending adding in wellness practices incompatible with my life, but Neko was different.
She simply suggested I add weight training into my regime more, and cholesterol-wise, she recommended eating out less and avoiding butter, cheese and cream to get my cholesterol back to optimum levels.
My verdict on Neko
Given that the scan is designed to be a "preventive health check for the future self", the fact that results are available in 30 minutes, rather than the usual anxiety-inducing wait you might experience post-appointment, is a huge positive.
In my case, I’d had a GP appointment in my diary for over three weeks about a marking on my stomach that I was worried about.
Waiting for the appointment was worrying, so it was one of the first things I asked Neko about. Within three minutes of my Neko scan my doctor was able to tell me it was nothing to worry about - meaning I cancelled my NHS appointment, freeing the slot up for someone else - and easing my own worries.
Do I need to know this much about my body?
I track my health with an Oura ring, and my fitness with my Apple Watch, and some friends questioned why I felt the need to add another health monitoring practice to my already fulsome routine.
My answer is that the more people I speak to in later life who are healthy (and indeed those struggling), the clearer it becomes that looking after my health while I'm well is the path to long-term wellness.
There's no point only looking after myself when things start going south. Tests such as Neko's scan show how I need to care for myself now to safeguard my future health.
So while it might seem scary to know so much about my body and its inner workings, I'm seeing it more as insurance for my future self – and you can't put a price on that.
