Rise and Fall: Whole body scanning clinics are going bust, not surprisingly. Their appeal was short-lived, being a high cost item of little use. The market was limited and saturated quickly. People who were persuaded by the advertising got the scans in the first year or two, and then had no further need for them, especially if they ended up following a wild diagnostic goose chase for innocuous lumps and calicifications.

But the funniest part of the article was the claim that radiologists were attracted to the centers not for the easy money, but for the chance to interact with patients:

The business also appealed to radiologists who normally send reports to doctors but have little contact with patients. At the scanning center, though, Dr. Brant-Zawadzki sat down with patients and discussed their scans. "It was very pleasurable," he said, adding that "it also promoted the value of radiologists to those patients."

This is closer to the truth:

Dr. Carl Rosenkrantz, a radiologist in Boca Raton, Fla., said the business had another appeal - it promised radiologists a good living without being on call at a hospital and even without necessarily being present at the scanning center.

"The goal in life seems to be to try to figure out some way where you don't have to go to the hospital, where you don't have to take calls," Dr. Rosenkrantz said. "Radiologists saw this as a cash business and a way out."

....As for Dr. Giannulli, he has moved on to other things. He founded a company, CareTools Inc., which sells software for medical record keeping to doctors' offices. That, he says, is the new frontier in medicine.

No call, no patients, no hospital. The radiology dream job.