Not true we have applied for spousal pr in dec 2021 and did upfront medicals in delhi with in oct 2022.
March 14 2022 medical was passed with no AOR. I directly linked application online with passport nmbr and. PA DOB
It is
possible to do the medical exam upfront.
BUT: IRCC tells you not to do it. It may end up wasting time, and costing extra money. It will NOT (as far as I can tell) save anyone time on a spousal sponsorship. (Okay, there might be occasional cases, and there may have been some esp during covid when some clinics were basically not able to keep up with medical exam requests). If the upfront medicals don't get linked or can't get found or aren't accepted, it's your problem.
It is QUITE common here to see questions like this - "I did upfront medical exam, I now got request for medical, it says 30 days only, how do I deal with it? I sent docs to IRCC they haven't and I don't know what to do, I'm freaking out."
So clearly - there IS actually a problem with doing upfront medicals.
And it's true - it's hard to know exactly what to do, or if you can get IRCC to link the upfront medical with the file, how long it might take, etc. And note: IRCC is under NO (zero!) obligation to take your upfront medical exam results. (The hint was that they tell you on the site to NOT do it).
Now speculating a bit: my impression is that virtually all the cases where people have decided to do upfront medical for spousal sponsorship apps are from India (or possibly also from neighbouring countries). I can only guess that this is a thing that a bunch of immigration consultants recommend for whatever reason (part of the
utterly useless information and advice that they provide to convince clients their services are worth more than zero dollars).