I am proud to announce that, several months after ordering it, our Styku body composition scanner arrived last week and is now operational. Starting immediately, my patients can regularly have painless, non-invasive, radiation free body scans here in the office that will provide them with key information about their metabolic health and their risk for developing chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and cancer, as well as feedback about weight loss and fitness efforts.
For a bit of background, Styku is a brand that builds body composition scanners and that is increasingly popular in gyms and with fitness trainers. It allows you to have a fairly accurate breakdown of how much of your weight is muscle versus fat, to track important body measurements such as waistline over time, and to get a measure of how your fat is distributed throughout your body. I’ll come back to this topic in a moment, but first let me give you a brief introduction to the process.
The scanner is pictured below. A person who needs a scan stands on the circular part for less than a minute while they are very slowly rotated around:
During the scan, the tower part takes thousands of images using a harmless infrared camera, and then about a minute later, a graphic of your insides is generated that looks like this:
As you can see, the scan also generates a lot of data about your body composition (it also generates several pages worth of additional data that is not shown in the photo).
Studies show that the Styku is accurate to within 2% of a DEXA scan, which is considered the “gold standard” for evaluating body composition. However, unlike the DEXA, the Styku emits no radiation and is thus completely harmless.
Of critical importance is that the Styku gives a report on how much visceral fat you have inside your body. Visceral fat is the fat deep inside your abdominal cavity that is linked to an increased risk for heart disease, dementia, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. Knowing this number is crucial because, though visceral fat tends to track with overall obesity, there are many thin people who are “hiding” a shockingly high amount of visceral fat (and are therefore at an elevated risk for chronic disease) as well as obese people who are actually storing little visceral fat and are therefore metabolically healthy despite their total body weight. I have touched on the importance of visceral fat in a prior post, and this is a topic I will doubtless return to at some point, as we are coming to increasingly appreciate that most modern chronic diseases are linked to an excess of visceral fat.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that one of the best things you can do to stay healthy and improve your odds of living to an old age is to keep your visceral fat at a minimum, and I would argue that being able to measure how much visceral fat you have and track it over time as you trial different lifestyle interventions is just as helpful as knowing metrics like your blood pressure or your blood sugar levels. Using Styku, I can now give patients exactly this information.
I will again invite you to ponder the differences between a holistically oriented direct primary care practice such as mine, versus the standard care offered in the corporate type of primary care practice that I spent the first decade of my career working in.
In standard insurance-driven practice, the focus is on treating problems only after they arise. The prime imperative is to keep costs down, and if a test can’t be justified on the basis of the “how will it change our care?” question, it isn’t paid for and isn’t offered. Since the advice to eat well and exercise is always correct, a Styku scan would therefore be viewed as an unnecessary luxury and wouldn’t even be considered. And so even though doctors understand well the dangers of visceral fat, nobody would ever think to directly test for it.
But as I wrote about in my last blog post, “how will it change our care?” is a question that makes a lot of sense from a business perspective, but doesn’t always make sense from a human nature perspective. Giving patients information, feedback, and motivation are in fact key components of medical care as far as I’m concerned.
Freed from the constraints of the insurance system however, I can think outside the box and design a medical practice unlike anything offered in the mainstream system. To me, being able to measure and track visceral fat is critically important, so I went ahead and purchased our Styku, knowing that the amortized cost of it over time will ultimately amount to only a small business expense which will enable me to provide my patients with better care.
I am proud to be able to offer my patients Styku body composition scans, a powerful tool to help them reach their health goals.
