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A few months ago, I was invited to get a full-body scan in east London. Neko Health is one of several diagnostic clinics that, for a price, uses electrocardiograms, blood tests and a talking skin-scanner to examine you. The company claims it can detect various underlying cardiovascular and metabolic issues, assess your risk of developing pre-diabetes and identify suspect moles.
From the outside, the centre looks like a vast glass mausoleum. Inside, it’s more of a curve-walled spa with pleasant changing areas, private examination rooms and pot plants. Sadly, there’s no swimming pool. The whole process takes less than an hour, and includes (among other things) a mostly nude scan, various blood draws, a test for grip strength and, at the end, through some swift data-crunching, a GP consultation. Most patients (me included) leave with a relatively clean bill of health but an eye on future issues. In its first year of operation, Neko says that 1% of its patients received potentially life-saving intel, which is not nothing. The idea is that this data can then be used to inform the NHS (or other healthcare providers), point people towards necessary treatment and, ultimately, extend life. Welcome to the age of preventive healthcare?
Compared with some of the private clinics on the market, Neko, which was set up by Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek and has two outposts in London, is not wildly expensive – £299, as compared with the Kardashian-approved Prenuvo, which is coming to London, and costs almost £2,000. Although your money is useless unless you can find a way to skip Neko’s 100,000-person waiting list in the UK or in Sweden, where it’s from. Among those queue-jumpers have been some influencers (and less influential members of the press, like me). You may have seen them on social media, where playing God feels a lot more plausible if you’re wearing a butter-yellow dressing gown while bathed in the glow of a ring flash.
My Neko experience was perfectly pleasant. It doesn’t hurt. I enjoyed wafting through their pastel-walled rooms wearing their Nike sliders. And I also appreciated the unhurried experience, though that’s perhaps more of a reflection on the state of the NHS after years of underfunding. On the whole, 10 out 10 for the experience.
The real question is whether it’s worth it, which is harder to parse. Partly because there is no control group, and because a glowing review from me would depend on whether it found anything – at which point I’d probably be less concerned with giving it five stars on Yelp. It’s also worth pointing out that it doesn’t perform X-rays, MRIs or CT scans, so can only detect blood abnormalities and skin cancers. People in my family tree have been riddled with tumours, and while I was reassured that none of my moles look untoward, all I can do now is live my life waiting for an unwanted growth – assuming I don’t drown in a flood first.
The trouble with a two-tier system that begins with a private triage service is that the burden then lies with you, and the NHS, which is potentially left to do the difficult work of treatment. Prof Azeem Majeed, a GP and expert on primary care and public health at Imperial, told the Guardian last year that Neko’s scans were more technologically advanced, and included additional testing, compared with the NHS Health Check programme, which screens people aged between 40 and 74.
Preventive beauty is rooted in the ambient terror that one day we will look as old as we actually are.
However, Majeed said that “dealing with the rapid developments in private medical assessments will be challenging for the NHS and it is essential that these assessments add value to people’s health and do not create additional work – or anxiety for customers – without clear benefits”. Though I imagine some of Neko’s customers will have other private healthcare options tucked into their wallets.
Early diagnosis is vital to treat serious diseases such as cancer, so the appeal of testing is obvious. But these scans tap into something deeper, an iteration of something you see among dictators and Silicon Valley types, that vainglorious cohort who honestly believe they can live for ever – or, in the case of Palantir founder and Trump ally, Peter Thiel, aren’t sure humanity should last at all.
Neko did not invent our preoccupation with longevity, just as it’s not news that rich people live longer. Some of them even look younger, too. The beauty industry had been resisting the passage of time for centuries before I first slapped Nivea on to my face as a teenager. Prevention is just a new way of phrasing it, and paid-for preventive healthcare is a natural evolution of these preventive beauty products.
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Along with beauty buzzwords such as “slow-ageing” (big in 2025, according to the trend forecasters WGSN), and “prejuvenation” (big in my inbox), the goal of prevention is not stopping or reversing time, words with which the Advertising Standards Agency has taken issue. It’s about delaying it. It’s symptomatic of the lengths we’ll go to conform to impossible standards – another stick that women used to beat ourselves with, as if the responsibility is ours. The business of preventive beauty presents as almost sceptical of anti-ageing – particularly facelifts and tweakments, which seem undignified compared with a night cream. Yet both are rooted in the ambient terror that one day we will look as old as we actually are.
I’ve tried a lot of these creams. I enjoy the process. And I dare say some of them make me glow. But they aren’t better than a good night’s sleep, good genes or generally being more chill. Even still, these are solutions to something out of your hands. However much you buy Susan Sontag’s reading that ageing is “a crisis of the imagination rather than of ‘real life’”, society – and the beauty industry – will still have you believe that you are old as soon as you are not young.
On paper, Neko and its like are not about cheating death – that would be absurd. And the benefits of early intervention on your health is obviously a very different matter than early intervention on your wrinkles. But in the end – scans, creams, whatever – it is all a battle with nature, just tackled in slightly different ways. Having explored and exploited every inch of our planet, we are now trying to colonise ourselves, to overcome mortality. Or at the very least, iron out its wrinkles.
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