Booking my first proper health check at 46. Which add-ons were worth it for you and which just generated worry?

Right, I've decided this is the year I stop being the man who "never goes to the doctor". Booking a proper checkup, and the clinic's menu is where I've come unstuck. The core package is bloods, blood pressure, the sensible-sounding basics. Then there's a page of add-ons: heart calcium score, full-body MRI, a panel of tumour marker blood tests, ultrasounds of various organs, and the prices climb fast.

My instinct says more information = better, but I've read enough on this site to suspect that instinct is exactly what the menu is designed for.

So, people who've actually bought these: which add-ons would you pay for again, and which do you wish you'd left alone? Family history on my side is heart disease (dad, both uncles), if that changes the answer.

With that family history, the one add-on I'd look hardest at is the calcium score, and I say that as someone who bought it for the same reason (dad, heart attack at 61). Mine came back higher than expected for a runner, which was not a fun letter, but it was actionable, my doctor and I had a completely different conversation about prevention than we'd have had without it. It changed actual decisions. That's my bar for a test now: would a result change anything we'd do?

The full-body MRI I looked at for a long time and walked away from, after reading up on how often they find harmless somethings that then need chasing. I've told my nodule story elsewhere on this board and that was from a much narrower scan.

Ask the clinic which add-ons they'd recommend FOR YOUR HISTORY rather than which are available. The good ones answer that question happily. The menu-ish ones get vague.

dgb1968 said:

My instinct says more information = better

This instinct cost me about five months. I did the full-body MRI two years ago, it found two "incidental findings of uncertain significance", and both needed follow-up imaging before anyone would say the magic word benign. Which they both were.

I'm not saying nobody should ever have one. I'm saying I went in expecting reassurance and came out with homework, and nobody at the sales end had prepared me for that being the LIKELY outcome, not the unlucky one. Wouldn't buy it again. The boring bloods, every time.

This thread is turning into the page I wish I'd read before my own first checkup, so let me add the founding story of this site: the test that changed my life was not a scan with a waiting list and a four-figure price. It was a blood pressure cuff. A workplace screening I nearly skipped found a number high enough to matter, confirmed over a few more visits, zero symptoms, and catching it early rerouted everything since. The cheapest, least glamorous item on every menu is the one that actually caught something in my case.

That experience is why the site's guide on whether to pay for a private screening package spends so much time on the boring core and so little on the brochure stars. The pattern gregor names, "would the result change what we'd do", is also the spine of it.

dgb, the family history you mention is exactly the kind of thing that should shape the answer, and shape it in conversation with your own doctor rather than at the checkout page. Take the menu to them, not the other way round. Report back on what you pick, threads like this are much more useful with endings.

Update as ordered. Took the menu to my doctor, slightly sheepish, expecting to be laughed at. Wasn't. We settled on the core package plus the calcium score (the family history swung it, exactly as gregor predicted), and a firm no to the full-body MRI and the tumour marker panel, her words were that for someone with no symptoms they'd mostly be "buying questions, not answers".

Booked for the second week of January. Will report back on how it goes.