Never for the Device Itself | Bad Devices

The rest of this section documents five machines one at a time. Read individually, each one produces the same shrug: an unproven device, some regulatory noise, no consequences. Five separate gaps look like five separate failures of attention.

Set them beside one another and something else appears. The gap is in the same place every time.

If you would rather see it than read it — the same record is plotted on a single axis at Twenty-five years, side by side. Promotion on the upper track, regulation on the lower. The upper one runs the full width of the chart. The lower one is essentially a single week in November 2012, and then nothing for nine years. That page shows the shape; this one explains why the shape is like that.

What this page is. A cross-tabulation of material documented in detail on the individual device pages, which carry the citations. Nothing here is new evidence; the point is what the evidence looks like assembled. Where a cell is uncertain we say so on the face of the table rather than in a footnote, because a comparison whose authority rests on completeness cannot afford a quiet guess.

The grid

Five devices documented in this section, and every enforcement outcome located for each. Searched July 2026.
Device	Canada	United States	Elsewhere	Ever convicted for the device?
Breast thermography	Nothing No charge, no fine, no college decision. Advisories in 2012 and 2017; a border alert and letters with no published outcome.	Letters, one licence Six FDA warning letters, January 2011 to February 2019. One California chiropractic licence surrendered in March 2023 — a settlement, not a finding. No charge.	Not searched	No
EAV / Vegatest	Administrative Four device licences suspended in 2002 — stops sale and import, takes no money, penalises nothing sold beforehand. One physician disciplined by the CPSO over twenty years, in which Vegatest use formed part of the finding. One anonymised letter of counsel.	Nothing located	Not searched	No
Zapper / Syncrometer	Nothing No advisory, recall, licence action or prosecution naming the devices or their maker.	Civil only FTC complaint, January 2003, under Operation Cure.All. Resolved by a settlement order carrying no admission. Refunds to American consumers only. An earlier Indiana criminal charge did not proceed — see the note below on how it ended.	Not searched	No
EPFX / QXCI / SCIO	Unverifiable A February 2009 ban is asserted everywhere and traceable only to two CBC broadcasts. No departmental instrument located.	Import control Barred by FDA import alert, January 2008. The developer was charged criminally and left the country; see the note below.	Marketed on a separate European registration	No
Live blood analysis	Nothing No college decision, advisory or Competition Bureau proceeding located.	Prison Its foremost promoter convicted in 1996, 2016 and February 2025; sentenced in May 2025 to five years eight months. The counts were practising medicine without a licence, elder abuse and theft — not the diagnostic claim.	Convicted United Kingdom: nine counts under the Cancer Act 1939 in March 2014, seven counts against a second practitioner in May 2014, and a further conviction with a Criminal Behaviour Order in April 2018.	Only in the UK

Read down the last column. In two countries, across five devices and three decades, the number of people convicted for selling an unproven diagnosis is zero.

Two cells we are flagging rather than filling.

The EPFX developer. Sources consistently record that he faced criminal charges in the United States and that he has lived in Hungary since. We have not established what the charges were, whether they remain outstanding, or whether extradition was ever sought. The table therefore says charged and departed, and not "never tried," which would be our inference rather than a finding.

The Indiana charge against Hulda Clark. Our own material says two different things: that the charge was dropped, and that it was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. Those are not the same, and until we resolve it from the court record the table says only that it did not proceed. If you hold the disposition, we would like it.

Four kinds of action, and why the distinction is the whole point

Promotional material and critical material both tend to collapse these into "action was taken" or "nothing happened." Neither is accurate, and the difference between them is where this section's argument lives.

What each kind of action actually does, and whether it appears anywhere in the grid above.
Kind of action	What it does	What it does not do	Found on these devices?
Criminal prosecution	Charges an individual. Can imprison. Creates a public finding after a trial or a plea.	Requires a prosecutor to decide the conduct is worth charging.	Never for the device Only ever for adjacent offences — unlicensed practice, elder abuse, theft — or, in the UK, for the advertising.
Civil enforcement	An agency sues. Can obtain orders, prohibitions and money.	Usually settles. Settlement orders routinely carry no admission of anything.	Once The 2003 FTC action, settled with no admission, refunds limited to Americans.
Administrative measure	Suspends a licence, stops an import, issues an advisory. Fast, and requires no court.	Takes no money. Penalises nothing already sold. Does not reach a machine already sitting in an office.	The bulk of the record The 2002 Canadian licence suspensions, the 2008 US import alert, the 2012 advisory and border alert, six FDA letters.
Professional discipline	Reaches the practitioner rather than the product. Can impose conditions, or end a career.	Only touches people who hold a licence — and many operators of these devices hold none.	Twice One Ontario physician over twenty years; one California chiropractic licence surrendered in 2023. No Canadian naturopathic decision naming any of these devices.

Notice which row is full and which is empty. Nearly everything in the record is administrative — the category that is quickest to obtain, requires no court, and by design does the least. It stops the next sale. It does nothing about the machine already bought, the practitioner already using it, or the patient already scanned. The categories that reach a person, and that produce a finding somebody must answer for, are almost entirely unused.

This is not a limit of the law

The obvious objection to everything above is that selling a useless diagnostic test may simply not be an offence, and that regulators are doing what the statutes allow. The record says otherwise. The same systems, in the same countries, in the same period, have moved hard on comparable conduct.

What the same machinery produces when it is actually used. None of these concerns a device documented in this section.
Case	Where	Outcome	What it proves
QLaser	South Dakota	12 years	A low-level laser sold on cancer claims. Civil injunctions in 2015, defied; criminal conviction and a twelve-year sentence in 2018, with two distributors also imprisoned — one of them a resident of Ontario, sentenced in an American court while Canada did nothing. The full escalation ladder, used end to end. See Who has actually been charged.
Mail-order cancer testing	South Dakota	9 years	Bogus diagnosis by post — blood, saliva and hair samples, followed by a cancer finding and a supplement sale. Mail fraud and misbranding. Nine years in federal prison. A fraudulent diagnostic is chargeable when somebody charges it.
Unlicensed lasers and IPL	Quebec	$68,593	Guilty plea in Quebec Provincial Court, December 2021. Selling and advertising unlicensed devices, false statements to inspectors, interfering with seized devices. Health Canada does seize hardware and does prosecute — over hair-removal equipment.
Slimming machine	Quebec	$70,000	Competition Tribunal, September 2006. Administrative penalties and a ten-year prohibition order over performance claims not based on adequate and proper testing. The Competition Act route works on health-device claims, requires no professional licence, and has never been pointed at any device in the grid above.
Cancer advertising	United Kingdom	Convicted	One London council's trading standards office read a website, prosecuted under a 1939 statute, won on nine counts, won the appeal, and returned four years later for a Criminal Behaviour Order when the defendant carried on. Total public cost: one investigating officer's time.

The gap was described in 2006, by the person whose job it was

Everything above is our assembly of the record. The following is not. It is a description of the same gap, given to a national broadcaster twenty years ago, by the official then responsible for cancer screening programs in Ontario.

On 23 May 2006 CBC News ran a story headed Unproven breast cancer screening test may steer women away from mammograms. It reported that women were paying more than $200 for a temperature-based alternative to mammography. A naturopath from a company arranging thermography clinics across Canada said the scan was 88 per cent effective at finding circulation problems, though it could not say whether a woman had breast cancer — and that where a scan showed hot areas, she treated them with herbs and botanical medicine so they would not develop into a tumour.

Dr. Verna Mai, who headed screening programs for Cancer Care Ontario, answered that there was no good, sound evidence that such remedies prevent breast cancer, and that women choosing thermography over mammography in the belief that the two are equivalent are being terribly misled.

She then explained why nobody was stopping it.

Health Canada regulates the promotion of drugs and treatments but not of screening tests — making thermography, in her words, a case of buyer beware.

That is the seam, named by a provincial cancer agency in 2006. Six years before Health Canada's advisory, eleven years before it was repeated, and twenty years before this page was written, the person running Ontario's screening programs told a national audience that the product fell between the regulatory categories — and that the consequence for the public was buyer beware. Nothing in the two decades since has closed it. The tables above are what "buyer beware" looks like when it is left in place for twenty years.

And the warning that did eventually come has now been retired. Health Canada's most recent statement on breast thermography is an Information Update of 28 September 2017, which reminds Canadians that thermograms are not a substitute for mammograms, that the devices are licensed only to measure skin temperature, similar to a thermometer, and that the department is not aware of any clinical evidence that they work for early detection. That page now carries the government's archive banner: it is not subject to the Government of Canada Web Standards and has not been altered or updated since it was archived.

So a woman searching in 2026 finds a federal warning the department itself flags as no longer maintained, and clinic websites updated this month. The 2017 update also announced exactly what the 2012 advisory had announced — that Health Canada would follow up with manufacturers and work with the Canada Border Services Agency. Five years apart, the same two measures, and no outcome published for either.

QuackeryWatch comment

Everything below this line is our argument. Everything above it is checkable, and a reader who rejects our conclusion should still be able to use the tables.

Put the three tables together and the conclusion is hard to avoid. The conduct is chargeable — a man in South Dakota got nine years for posting people a fake cancer diagnosis. The statutes exist in Canada — the Competition Act produced $70,000 against a slimming machine in 2006 and has sat unused on every device in this section ever since. The investigators exist, and they seize hardware, as a Laval company found in 2021. And where a jurisdiction has a purpose-built offence, as Britain does, a single council officer was enough to secure convictions twice.

So the empty column is not a gap in the law. It is a gap in what anybody has decided to charge.

We think there is a reason, and it is structural rather than sinister. These devices sit precisely in the seam — and, as the section above records, that seam was described publicly in 2006 by the head of screening at Cancer Care Ontario, who called the result buyer beware. Health Canada regulates the product, and its instruments stop at the establishment door. The colleges regulate the practitioner, and many operators hold no licence for a college to reach. The Competition Bureau regulates the claim, and nobody has brought it a file. Each body can point to another body's jurisdiction, and each is correct. The machine in the room belongs to none of them.

The other reason is that nothing forces the issue. Almost every correction documented across this section — the 2002 front-page objection, the radiologists' letters, the 2006 broadcast, the 2016 newspaper investigation, the television programme that produced an advisory the following day — was generated by a journalist or a physician acting on their own initiative. Regulators moved when publicity arrived and stopped when it left. That is not a system of patient protection. It is a system that responds to embarrassment.

What would change the grid

We would rather this page went out of date. Four things would do it, and none requires new legislation.

One Competition Bureau proceeding. A claim that an infrared camera finds cancer risk, or that a microscope image shows yeast overgrowth, is a performance claim. The statutory test is whether it rests on adequate and proper testing. On the evidence documented across this section, it does not. This is the most under-used route in the entire record and the only one that has ever produced money.
One published college decision. Not a private caution, not an anonymised newsletter item — a decision naming a registrant, so that patients can find it. California's chiropractic board showed in 2023 that a licensing body of exactly this kind can build the file, publish the allegations and end the licence.
One follow-up report. Health Canada announced a border alert, letters to manufacturers and a notice to the provinces in November 2012, announced the first two again in September 2017, and has never published what any of them produced. An announced measure whose outcome is never reported cannot be assessed by the public it was meant to protect — and the 2017 statement has since been archived rather than updated.
One prosecutor willing to treat a fake diagnosis as fraud. The South Dakota cases show it is possible. Nothing distinguishes a mailed cancer result from a thermogram read in Toronto except that somebody decided to charge the first one.

All four of those start with somebody filing something. Current contact details for the Competition Bureau, Health Canada's enforcement branch, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre and the Minister of Health — with an honest account of what each body can and cannot do — are on How to complain, and to whom.

What this page does not claim

It does not claim that any person or business has committed an offence. It reports outcomes that are already public and counts the categories they fall into.
It does not claim any regulator has acted unlawfully. Our criticism is of priority and follow-through, and it is marked as opinion where it appears.
It does not claim the grid is complete. It reflects what is published and indexed as at July 2026, and the "elsewhere" column has not been systematically searched at all — it is marked as unsearched rather than empty, which are different things.
It does not treat a settlement, a surrender or an undertaking as a finding of wrongdoing, and says so wherever one appears.
It does not claim the absence of prosecutions means the devices are lawful, or that their presence would mean they are not. Enforcement is evidence about regulators. The evidence about the machines is on the individual pages.
It does not suggest that the official quoted from the 2006 broadcast holds any view about this page or this site. She was answering a reporter's questions in 2006, and is quoted here for what she said then.

Sources

Every entry in these tables is documented, with citations, on the page for the device concerned: breast thermography and its enforcement record; EAV and the Vegatest; the Zapper and the Syncrometer; the Quantum Xrroid; and live blood analysis. The Canadian regulatory record in full, including the provincial college tables and the payer determinations, is in the regulatory tables. The comparison cases in the third table are documented on Who has actually been charged and in the regulatory tables.

The 2006 material is from CBC News, "Unproven breast cancer screening test may steer women away from mammograms," posted 23 May 2006. The federal statements are Health Canada's advisory of 28 November 2012, "Thermography Machines not Authorized to Screen for Breast Cancer," and its Information Update of 28 September 2017, "Health Canada reminds Canadians that thermograms are not a substitute for mammograms for breast cancer screening" (identification number RA-64636), the latter now carried in the Government of Canada web archive.

Corrections

This page is the most correctable thing on the site, because a single new decision anywhere changes a cell. If you know of a prosecution, penalty, order, undertaking or published discipline decision concerning any of these five devices — in any country, from any body — send the citation and the grid will be amended. Corrections that fill an empty cell are the most valuable thing anyone can send us, and they will be published whether or not they suit the argument above. We would particularly welcome the disposition of the Indiana charge, and the detail of the American charges against the developer of the EPFX.

The five devices

Breast thermography — an infrared camera sold as breast cancer screening.
EAV and the Vegatest — electrodermal screening and its commercial descendants.
The Zapper and the Syncrometer — Hulda Clark's two machines.
The Quantum Xrroid — EPFX, QXCI and SCIO.
Live blood analysis — darkfield microscopy sold as diagnosis.
Bad Devices index

And the same record, as a chart

Twenty-five years, side by side — every promotional event and every regulatory event from 2001 to 2026, plotted on one axis. It also sets out, plainly, the one chart we could not build: a year-by-year count of Canadian clinics, and why the data to draw it honestly does not exist.
What the reading laboratory published — what the American laboratory that reports for network partners in the United States and Canada published about the evidence, set against twelve marketing claims.