QuackeryWatch

Who Has Actually Acted?

Five reference tables covering electrodermal screening and breast thermography: what the provincial naturopathic regulators have published, what Health Canada's device branch has done, and which other Canadian bodies stepped in instead. The second table has entries. The first is very nearly empty — and not because nobody asked.

Two devices, documented elsewhere in this section: electroacupuncture according to Voll and its commercial descendants, and digital infrared thermal imaging sold as breast cancer screening. Both have been used in Canada for decades. Both are used predominantly, though not exclusively, by practitioners the provinces licence and hold out to the public as regulated professionals.

The question this page exists to answer is narrow and factual: when a registrant uses one of these machines, has anyone with authority over that registrant ever done anything about it?

Table 1 — The provincial naturopathic regulators

Across six provinces, over roughly three decades of documented use, the entire published naturopathic disciplinary record on these two devices is one letter of counsel with the name removed.

The school spoke. The regulator did not.

The blank in Table 1 is not the result of the profession never having been asked. It was asked directly, at the highest level, within weeks of the federal advisory — and the answer came from the wrong institution.

After issuing its November 2012 advisory, Health Canada did not simply publish and move on. It sent a direct communication to the Canadian Association of Naturopathic Doctors restating its concerns. A discussion followed among the profession's principal Ontario bodies: the association, Naturopathic Doctors Ontario, the Clinical Therapeutics Committee of the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine, and the Board of Directors of Drugless Therapy — Naturopathy, which was then the province's naturopathic regulator and whose functions passed to the College of Naturopaths of Ontario when the new regulatory framework came into force in 2015.

So the regulator of the day was in the room. It had the federal advisory in hand, it had the association's attention, and it had a specific question in front of it about a device its registrants were selling to women as cancer screening.

What emerged publicly was a position statement from the Clinical Therapeutics Committee of the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine, signed by seven naturopathic doctors including the committee's chair. It concluded that the committee does not recommend screening breast thermography in naturopathic practice, and that it was concerned about uncertain benefits in the face of substantial harm. On the evidence it reported that the base is a few small studies pointing in incompatible directions — sensitivity of 25% in one and 97% in another, specificity of 85% and 44% respectively, and a positive predictive value in the first of 24%, meaning roughly a quarter of the women with a positive thermogram actually had a malignancy. No large study has evaluated the technique against death from cancer.

A further wrinkle worth knowing, because it compounds the confusion the silence leaves behind: practitioners were being certified to write and interpret breast thermography reports after roughly three days of training, by a private body trading under the name “College of Medical Thermography.” A member of the public trying to work out whether a thermogram provider is properly credentialled encounters that word attached to a certifying business, while the actual colleges — the ones with statutory authority — have published nothing on the subject at all.

The sequence, 2001 to today

Set the promotion and the regulation side by side in date order and two things become visible that neither table shows on its own.

Red marker = the device being promoted or sold · Purple = Health Canada · Grey = other markers: evidence assessments, press coverage, and the closing null finding

1. Jul 1995A major American insurer classifies thermography as unprovenAetna Clinical Policy Bulletin 0029, effective 21 July 1995, treats thermography — including digital infrared thermal imaging — as experimental, investigational or unproven for all indications. Not a regulator, but a documented evidence assessment, in public, six years before the earliest Canadian marketing in this timeline.
2. 2001A screening company is already operating in CanadaMobile clinics touring the country in partnership with alternative health-care providers, per the company's own account given to a newspaper in 2011.
3. Jun 2002A clinic is advertised — and the objection is publishedOwen Sound front page. The area's acting medical officer of health and a University of Toronto breast-disease epidemiologist dispute the promotional claims and warn of false reassurance.
4. Dec 2003The case is made inside the hospitalsA trade paper circulating to hospital staff carries an article promoting first-step breast screening by thermography, written by the co-founder of a thermography company whose advertisement occupies the same page. It sets out the grading scale and describes the lowest grade as reassurance.
5. Jun 2006The ten-year claim, on air, unchallengedThe founder of what is now a multi-country thermography network sets out the whole case across a long internet radio interview, including the argument that a tumour visible on a mammogram has been growing nine or ten years and that thermography may see it at year one. See The 2006 broadcast.
6. 2006A syndicated feature runs in three citiesCalgary, Saskatoon and Vancouver within five weeks, carrying practitioners' claims and their prices.
7. 2009–2011Paid advertising, including a full broadsheet pageA seminar advertisement in Regina, a full page in Welland, a mobile clinic at a Moncton day spa.
8. Mar 2012Canada's own health technology agency reviews the evidenceCADTH, funded by the federal, provincial and territorial governments, publishes an assessment finding no randomized controlled trials comparing thermography with mammography for screening well women, and performance worse than mammography on sensitivity, specificity and predictive values. Eight months before the advisory.
9. 27 Nov 2012A CBC investigation airsNational television coverage of thermography clinics operating in Canada.
10. 28 Nov 2012Health Canada issues Information Update 2012-178The machines are not approved for breast cancer screening; the department knows of no scientific evidence supporting that use; advertising or selling them for it is illegal.
11. Nov 2012A border alert, letters to manufacturers, notice to the provincesAll three announced in the same week. No published record confirming what any of them produced has been located.
12. 2016The advertising is still runningAn Ontario advertising feature carrying a detection-rate claim and a price list; a British Columbia news item announcing a mobile clinic, with no mention of the advisory.
13. 2017The advisory is restatedHealth Canada clarifies that these cameras are licensed only to measure skin temperature, in the way a thermometer does.
14. Mar 2023A licensing board elsewhere ends a licence over itA California chiropractor surrenders his licence to the state board, resolving an accusation almost entirely concerned with breast thermography. No Canadian equivalent exists. See Who has actually been charged.
15. Jul 2026No Canadian enforcement action locatedNo seizure, prosecution, fine or licence action naming a breast thermography device has been found, federally or provincially. The device is still being advertised in Ontario, by a network described on One reader, many clinics.

The first gap is about ten and a half years. The device was being sold in Canada from at least 2001 and the clinical objection was in print in June 2002. The federal advisory came in November 2012.

Measured from the Aetna policy the interval is longer still — seventeen years and four months. That comparison needs a caveat, and we make it ourselves: an insurer is not a regulator, and a coverage decision is not a finding. But an insurer that declines to pay for a test has done the evidence review, published the conclusion, and kept it under periodic reassessment. That policy has been in continuous effect since 1995 and its most recent review is dated March 2026. Whatever else can be said about the evidence on thermography, it has not moved in thirty-one years.

The second gap is one day. The broadcast aired on 27 November 2012. The advisory followed on the 28th.

That one is sharper than it first appears, because of the entry above it. Canada's own health technology assessment agency had reviewed this evidence and published in March 2012. Eight months later the department had still issued nothing. Then a television programme aired, and the advisory followed the next day.

The third gap cannot be measured, because the interval has not closed. Health Canada announced three administrative measures in November 2012 — the border alert, the manufacturer letters and the notice to the provinces. Each was announced as done, and we have found no published record of what any of them produced: no count of devices stopped at the border, no compliance outcome, no follow-up report. Beyond the 2017 restatement, there is nothing further on the federal record. Thirteen years on, the interval between the announcement and a first enforcement action naming one of these devices is still open.

Table 2 — Health Canada

The federal picture is different. Health Canada has acted, repeatedly and on the record. What it has not done is follow through into a clinic.

Table 3 — Everyone else who acted

The most striking feature of the record is who moved when the profession's own regulators did not.

Table 4 — Has anyone ever been fined?

It is the question that cuts through everything else, so it deserves a direct answer: no financial penalty against anyone selling, importing or operating a breast thermography device for cancer screening in Canada has been located. Not a fine, not an administrative monetary penalty, not a forfeiture, not a costs award. The table below sets out what does exist, including the near misses, so the size of the gap is visible.

Table 5 — What the people who pay for tests decided

Regulators are not the only institutions that assess a diagnostic test. Insurers do it too, for their own reasons, and they publish the result because they have to defend a refusal to pay. That makes the payer record a parallel evidence trail — and on this device it runs four decades deep.

Why the Canadian column is empty

The gap is structural rather than sinister, and it is worth understanding because it explains a good deal else on this page.

American health insurers adjudicate individual procedures against medical necessity criteria, and when they refuse to pay they must give reasons that can be appealed and reviewed. That obligation is what produces the published policy bulletin. Medicare goes further still: its national coverage determinations are made through a public, evidence-based process and published by statute, which is why a 1984 decision is still readable today.

Canadian private insurance does not work that way. Under the Canada Health Act the provinces insure medically necessary physician and hospital services, and private carriers are largely barred from duplicating that coverage. What they sell instead is supplementary benefit — drugs, dental, vision, and paramedical services such as naturopathy, chiropractic and massage — and paramedical benefit is typically administered as an annual dollar cap per practitioner type. The plan reimburses a visit to a naturopath up to the limit. Nobody adjudicates what happened during the visit.

As for corporate links between the two markets — there are real ones, and the most direct is worth stating. The US health insurance business of a major Canadian insurer was sold to Cigna, completing on 1 April 2008. Cigna is one of the carriers in the table above with a published non-coverage policy. Other Canadian insurers own or have owned substantial American operations.

If you find one of these devices still in use

This is the practical section, and it is deliberately kept separate from our opinions. Everything below is a route that exists for any member of the public, about any product or practitioner. None of it requires you to prove anything first — that is the regulator's job, not yours.

Write down what you saw before you do anything else. The date, the clinic name and address, the name and stated credentials of the person operating or interpreting the scan, the price, and exactly what was claimed. Photograph or screenshot the advertisement, the website page, the price list and the intake form. Websites are edited quickly once a complaint lands, and a screenshot with a visible date is worth more than a recollection. If you were given a written report, keep it.

1. If a device is being sold, imported or advertised for breast cancer screening — Health Canada, Regulatory Operations and Enforcement Branch, using the Consumer Medical Device Report Form. This is the federal route and the one that matches the 2012 advisory directly. Note the branch name: the advisory was issued in 2012 by the Health Products and Food Branch Inspectorate, which has since been reorganised, so older references — including elsewhere on this page — name a branch you can no longer write to. Current contact details for this and every other route are on How to complain, and to whom.
2. If the operator is a regulated professional — the provincial college that licenses them: the naturopathic college, the college of chiropractors, or the college of physicians and surgeons, depending on their profession. Complaints must generally be in writing. Ask specifically whether the outcome will be published, and if the answer is no, ask why not.
3. If the operator is not regulated — and in Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador and the territories a naturopath will not be, because those jurisdictions do not regulate the profession — there is no college to complain to. The provincial health ministry and the Competition Bureau are the available routes. In Quebec, the practice of medicine by an unlicensed person is a matter for the Collège des médecins, which is how that college came to be involved in 2012.
4. If a performance or efficacy claim is being made — the Competition Bureau of Canada. This is the most under-used route on this page and the only one in the record that has actually produced a financial penalty. It applies to any claim about what a product does that is not based on adequate and proper testing, and it does not matter whether the person making it holds a licence.
5. If the images are read somewhere other than where they were taken — note that too, and say so in the complaint. Who interprets a scan, what qualification that person holds, and in which jurisdiction they sit are all material facts, and they are frequently not disclosed to the patient. See One reader, many clinics.
6. If the advertisement appeared in a newspaper, magazine or broadcast — complain to the publication as well. Ad Standards handles complaints about Canadian advertising. Editors and advertising managers respond to being told, and our press file shows how rarely anyone told them.

What these tables add up to

1. The federal record exists but stops at the door. Licences suspended, advisories issued, a border alert raised, manufacturers written to. All of it aimed at importation and sale. None of it aimed at the room where the machine is actually used.
2. The professional record is a blank. One anonymised letter of counsel, in one province, in one year. Six regulated provinces and roughly thirty years of documented use produced nothing else that a member of the public can read.
3. That blank is not ignorance. Health Canada took its 2012 advisory directly to the profession's national association; Ontario's naturopathic regulator of the day joined the discussion that followed; and the position against screening breast thermography was then published by the profession's school. The one body in that conversation without any power to investigate, restrict or discipline is the only one that said anything publicly.
4. Nor is the blank inevitable. A licensing board of the same kind — California's chiropractic regulator — built a file on breast thermography, named the registrant, published the allegations and ended the licence in 2023. The instrument exists. No Canadian college has used it.
5. Bodies with no jurisdiction did more than bodies with jurisdiction. Quebec's medical college opened an investigation in a province where naturopathy is unregulated. Two health ministries issued orders. A competition regulator obtained penalties and a decade-long prohibition. The naturopathic colleges published nothing.
6. The one adjudicated device case in the country was against a physician. Twenty years of process, ending in a relinquished medical licence — and it tells us nothing about how the profession that dominates the use of these devices handles them, because that profession was never party to it.
7. Canada did the evidence work, in March 2012, and built nothing on it. CADTH's review predates the federal advisory by eight months and reached the same conclusion American payers had reached decades earlier. It produced no coverage policy, no enforcement, no college decision and no penalty. The gap in the Canadian record is not the assessment; it is everything that should have followed one.
8. Five payers assessed it and none would pay. Medicare excluded thermography for breast lesions in 1984 and for all indications in 1992; Aetna has classed it unproven since 1995; Cigna, Capital Blue Cross and a regional plan reach the same result today. The Canadian side of that table is blank — not because anyone here looked and disagreed, but because the payment model never required anyone to look.
9. None of this is history. Breast thermography is being advertised in Ontario now, by a network run from a single Toronto office with clinics in five provinces and four other countries, and mobile units visiting towns that have no cancer centre. See One reader, many clinics.
10. How the machines reach the office is documented separately. See the supply chain for the import and training channels, and the newspaper record for how the devices were advertised to the public — including for years after the 2012 advisory said that advertising was illegal.

Related pages

• Who has actually been charged The enforcement record beyond Canada: six FDA warning letters between 2011 and 2019, the California licence surrendered in 2023, and no criminal charge over breast thermography anywhere.
• One reader, many clinics Who is selling this in Canada today — a Toronto-run network, a single reporting hub, private certification, and mobile units in towns with no cancer centre.
• The 2006 broadcast The ten-year claim set out on air nine years before the advisory, the hedges that came with it, and the public register of the physician whose wellness centre stood next door.
• EAV and the Vegatest The device class behind Table 1's first column — six marketing claims against the record, and the two blinded studies that tested the Vegatest directly.
• Breast thermography The November 2012 week in which Health Canada, the CBSA, two provincial ministers and Quebec's medical college all moved at once — and the years of quiet that followed.
• The supply chain How the hardware enters the country and where practitioners learn the method, documented from the distributors' own published statements.
• What the newspapers ran Nineteen items, 2002 to 2019. The medical objection ran on a front page ten years before the federal advisory, and the advertising continued for three and a half years after it.
• The Zapper and the Syncrometer A Saskatchewan-born naturopath's two devices, prosecuted in the United States under a campaign Health Canada had joined by name — with no Canadian action and no refunds for Canadians.