Eleven red flags in longevity clinic marketing, and how to check each one
None of these require medical knowledge to test. Every one can be checked from a clinic's own website before you speak to anybody, and most of the category fails at least three.
Every item below can be checked from a clinic’s own website, in about fifteen minutes, without knowing any medicine. They are ordered by how much they tell you, and the first one tells you the most.
1. The price is not published
Six of the sixteen providers in our Index do not publish a price. Clinique La Prairie, Chenot Palace, SHA Wellness, Palazzo Fiuggi, Q Bio and Fountain Life’s lower tiers all require contact first. Lanserhof publishes prices, but only inside downloadable PDF brochures.4
How to check: look for a price page with per-tier figures. Not “from”, not “contact us for pricing”, not a brochure download.
Why it matters: a business that will not tell you the price before a consultation has decided the consultation is where the price gets set. That is a choice about your position, and it correlates with everything else on this list.
2. Biological age is a headline outcome
If a clinic leads with a biological age number, or advertises that its patients reduced theirs, it is making a claim about instrument sensitivity that the instrument does not support. Repeated-measures work shows epigenetic clock estimates fluctuate substantially with meals, acute stress and pollution exposure, and that the most technically robust clocks are among the most biologically fragile.2
How to check: is a biological age figure on the homepage or in a results testimonial? Does the clinic state which clock it uses, and its within-person confidence interval?
Why it matters: as context inside a supervised programme, an epigenetic clock is defensible. As a headline outcome or a before-and-after result it is not, because the measurement cannot reliably detect the change being claimed.
3. Diagnosis and treatment sit in the same business
Where the entity interpreting your scan also sells the intervention your scan justifies, the incentive gradient runs one way. This does not require anyone to act in bad faith; the structure produces more findings and more treatment regardless of intent.
How to check: does the clinic sell therapies, infusions, supplements or hormone programmes alongside its diagnostics? If a finding pointed somewhere they do not treat, who would you be referred to?
Why it matters: diagnostic-only models and externally referred treatment remove a judgement call you would otherwise have to trust. It is one dimension on which the cheapest provider in the category often beats the most expensive.
4. No stated incidental-finding rate
Roughly one person in three scanned with whole-body MRI leaves with a finding that is either critical or unresolved: pooled prevalence is 13.4% for potentially serious findings and 32.1% once indeterminate ones are counted.1 A clinic performing hundreds of scans a year knows its own number.
How to check: search the site for “incidental”. If the only mention is reassuring, that is not the same as disclosing a rate.
Why it matters: this is the main documented harm of the product. Learning about it after your report arrives is not informed consent.
5. Nobody is named as owning the follow-up
How to check: are the physicians named, with credentials and registration? Does the material say who contacts you if something appears, and what happens next?
Why it matters: the difference between a defensible imaging programme and an indefensible one is mostly the apparatus around the scan. A PDF and a suggestion to see your GP is the failure mode.
6. Test performance is not disclosed
Sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value determine what a result actually means. A multi-cancer blood test with 39% all-cancer sensitivity is a useful supplement and a poor reassurance product, and you cannot know which you are being sold without the figures.
How to check: does any page give sensitivity and specificity for the screening tests on offer?
Why it matters: this is the strongest good-faith signal in the category precisely because it is costly to give. YEARS in Berlin publishes a section stating that it discloses sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value for its screening methods, that whole-body MRI finds abnormalities in many healthy people which would never have caused symptoms, and that asked whether the programme is study-backed the answer is only partly.6 We have not found an equivalent disclosure elsewhere in the Index, which says more about the category than about any one provider.
7. A mortality or survival claim for whole-body MRI
How to check: look for “could save your life”, “catch cancer before it spreads”, or survival statistics presented next to the scan.
Why it matters: no randomised trial has shown that whole-body MRI screening reduces mortality in asymptomatic adults.3 The claim is not merely unproven, it is the specific thing the literature has failed to establish across a decade of asking.
8. Free scans for press and influencers
How to check: search for reviews. Does the reviewer state whether they paid? Does the clinic’s press page offer complimentary assessments?
Why it matters: a review of a free five-figure programme is advertising with extra steps. The clinic knows this, which is why the scan was free.
9. No corrections mechanism
How to check: is there any route to challenge a figure or a claim, and any record of the clinic having changed something?
Why it matters: organisations that never correct anything are not error-free.
10. The upsells arrive after the consultation
How to check: ask directly what the median total invoice is, as opposed to the advertised programme price. In residential programmes especially, physicians commonly recommend additional treatments after the initial consultation and the final bill moves accordingly.
Why it matters: an advertised price you cannot actually pay is not a price.
11. Evidence claims that cite studies not saying that
The hardest one to check and the most revealing. Pick one confident claim, follow it to the citation, and read the abstract.
How to check: look for the gap between a population statistic and an individual-test claim. “Prevention reduces cardiovascular death by 80%” is about prevention broadly, not about the scan being sold beside it. Conflating the two is the most common move in the category, and YEARS is unusual in naming the problem on its own site: the big prevention statistics demonstrate the value of prevention and lifestyle overall rather than automatically that of each individual screening test.6
Why it matters: a provider willing to stretch a citation in marketing is telling you how it will present your results.
How to use the list
Nobody passes all eleven, and a clinic failing one is not disqualified. The pattern is what matters: a provider that publishes prices, names its physicians, discloses test performance and declines to claim a mortality benefit is operating differently from one that does none of those, and the difference has nothing to do with price.
One question compresses most of the list, and it comes from the consumer-guide literature rather than from us. Did the clinic mention any risk or uncertainty before it mentioned price?5 If not, that is information too.
Questions this article answers
- How do I choose a longevity clinic?
- Check five things on the website before contacting anybody: whether the price is published per tier, whether the clinic states its incidental-finding rate, whether a named physician owns the follow-up, whether it discloses test performance figures such as sensitivity and specificity, and whether it makes any survival or mortality claim for whole-body MRI. The last one should be absent, because no trial supports it. A clinic that clears the first four is in a small minority.
- What are red flags in a longevity clinic?
- Unpublished prices. Biological age presented as a finding rather than a rough trend marker. Diagnosis and treatment sold by the same business. No stated incidental-finding rate. No named physician owning follow-up. Test performance undisclosed. Mortality claims for whole-body MRI screening. Free scans given to press or influencers. No corrections mechanism. Upsells introduced only after the initial consultation. Evidence claims citing studies that do not support them.
- Why do some longevity clinics not publish their prices?
- Because the consultation is where the price gets decided. A clinic that will not tell you what a programme costs before you speak to a salesperson has made a choice about your negotiating position. In the Baseline Index, Clinique La Prairie, Chenot Palace, SHA Wellness, Palazzo Fiuggi, Q Bio and Fountain Life's lower tiers publish no comparable figure, and Lanserhof publishes its prices only inside downloadable PDF brochures.
- Should I trust a clinic that says its own tests have limited evidence?
- It is the strongest signal available, and it is rare. A provider that publishes the sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value of its screening methods, and states where the study evidence is thin, is handing you the tools to argue with it. That is the opposite of what marketing normally does, and it costs the provider something to do.
- O'Sullivan JW, et al. Prevalence and outcomes of incidental imaging findings on brain and body MRI of apparently asymptomatic adults. BMJ. 2018;361:k2387.
- Biological versus technical reliability of epigenetic clocks and implications for disease prognosis and intervention response. 2025.
- Kwee RM, Kwee TC. Whole-body MRI for preventive health screening: a systematic review. Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging. 2019.
- Lanserhof. Prices page, brochures published as PDF only.
- Consumer guide to comparing longevity clinics: features, prices and red flags. Longevity Fit Life.
- YEARS Präventivmedizin, Berlin. “Radical transparency: the questions other providers would rather not answer”, homepage section (English and German editions).
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