The post looked simple enough: Kim Kardashianpgbbqq, hair pulled back in a ponytail, posed in front of an M.R.I. wearing scrubs branded with the logo of the medical imaging company Prenuvo.

“I recently did this @prenuvo scan and had to tell you all about this life saving machine,” she wrote. The M.R.I. could pick up on traces of cancer or other diseases, she said.

A man in a hard hat and yellow vest turned on a hose, and water flowed out onto the street. Most streets are covered in standard asphalt, a hard surface that water pools on top of. But in this case, the water disappeared, seeping through the pavement before it reached the curb.

Many shipments have been diverted to West Coast ports, where dockworkers belong to a different union that agreed a new contract last year. The ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles say they are handling at least as many containers as they did during the pandemic shipping boom of 2021-22.

But the post was too simple, the University of Sydney public health researcher Brooke Nickel thought when she saw it in August 2023. What about the possible harms, she wondered? The test might find an extremely early stage cancer that would lead to a patient receiving invasive treatment, even though it may never have progressed to something more serious. Ms. Kardashian’s post made it seem like there were only upsides.

That post, and others like it,66jogo prompted Dr. Nickel to look into how other celebrities and influencers promote increasingly popular medical tests such as full-body M.R.I. scans. They also examined posts for products that claim to detect cancer in blood or analyze a hormone linked to fertility, testosterone levels and the gut microbiome.

The results of that study, which scrutinized nearly 1,000 TikTok and Instagram posts from accounts with hundreds of millions of combined followers, were published Wednesday. The paper found that an overwhelming majority of these posts were misleading, painting an overly rosy picture of these tests and rarely including scientific evidence. Only 15 percent mentioned potential harms. And more than two-thirds came from accounts with financial ties to the products, like influencers offering discounts and receiving sales commissions.

“If this is how patients are getting all their information, it’s really unfortunate, because it’s completely acting like medical tests are a new cool pair of sneakers,” said Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman, director of the Radiology Outcomes Research Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

did777

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.pgbbqq