Cenegenics - Beverly Hills

Cenegenics Beverly Hills is a membership-based preventative-medicine centre at 433 N Camden Drive, Suite 560, and it sells no one-off health screening: care comes as a membership programme, not a single visit. Its own site says it serves Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Santa Monica and Brentwood, and the group's location list names only one other California centre, in San Francisco.

Care starts with the Performance Health Assessment, which the clinic describes as extensive biomarker testing - blood work covering markers such as hormones, blood sugar and cholesterol - and those results feed an ongoing Performance Health Program. Membership is required and no prices are published, and our directory puts the centre in the $$$ band.

On top of the diagnostics run at every Cenegenics centre, the Beverly Hills page lists:

• VO2 max, a hard exercise test of the most oxygen your body can use while working at its limit
• DEXA body composition, a low-dose X-ray that measures the strength of your bones and how much of each part of your body is fat rather than muscle
• CIMT, an ultrasound that measures the wall thickness of the artery in your neck, used to gauge the risk of artery disease
• advanced CCTA, a CT scan of the arteries feeding the heart, read by software called Cleerly
• brain EEG (WAVi), which records electrical activity in the brain
• a 3D musculoskeletal scan, a whole-body scan the clinic says it uses to assess injury risk
• genetics, nutrigenomic and micronutrient testing, nutrigenomic testing being a look at how your genes affect the way you process nutrients

Also on the menu: hormone replacement therapy and bioidentical hormone therapy, exercise physiology testing, cardiovascular screening with advanced cholesterol testing, shockwave therapy offered for erectile dysfunction, and therapeutic plasma exchange, which removes and replaces plasma, the liquid part of blood. Hormones are prescription decisions made with a doctor.

The centre physician is Taylor Martin, MD, board certified in preventive medicine, with his medical degree from A.T. Still University and a preventive-medicine residency at Johns Hopkins. Four performance health coaches and a member experience coordinator are listed with him.

The centre is about 11 miles north of Los Angeles International Airport, recommends three nearby hotels for members travelling in, and validates parking in its underground garage. A free 10-minute call comes before any assessment is booked.

Two things to raise on that call. The site does not say which of these tests are run on site, and its own descriptions of plasma exchange and shockwave therapy are sales copy rather than evidence - ask what supports them for someone who is already well.