QuackeryWatch · Bad Devices
← Back to QuackeryWatchNine years before Health Canada warned about breast thermography, the founder of Canada's largest thermography network laid out the case for it on a late-night internet radio show hosted by a self-described psychic. What he said that night is still being advertised in Ontario today, almost word for word.
Documents like this one are rare. Most of what a promoter says is said in a consulting room or a seminar and leaves no record. Advertising is written by somebody else and lawyered before it runs. A transcript of a long, unhurried, entirely friendly interview is different: it is the argument as its author actually makes it, at length, to a listener who is not going to interrupt.
This one runs to about twenty thousand words and was broadcast on 11 June 2006. The guest was Alexander Mostovoy, then clinical director of a North York thermographic centre, now founder and chief executive of the Toronto company that reads images for thermography clinics in several countries. The structure of that network is described on our page about it.
The central argument of the interview is a piece of arithmetic, and it is worth following because everything else rests on it.
Mammography, he says, cannot see a tumour until it reaches about a centimetre on average. A tumour of that size has been developing for nine or ten years. It did not spring into existence at the moment it became visible — it was there the whole time. So why wait until year nine or ten, when, as he puts it, the guillotine drops and a woman is told she has breast cancer? Why not look at year one, year two, year three?
Then the payoff. This, he says, is where thermography comes in a winner: the mammogram cannot see it, the ultrasound cannot see it, the MRI cannot see it — but he may still see that something is up, because he may see the early development of angiogenesis, the blood supply a growing tumour recruits.
Now compare a clinic website in Waterloo Region in 2026. It advertises early warning up to ten years ahead of other methods. The clinic's director trained with him in Toronto in 2008, two years after this broadcast.
Twenty years separate those two statements. The number has not changed, the mechanism offered has not changed, and neither has the sales proposition: we see what your doctor's equipment cannot.
| 2006 broadcast | Advertised in Ontario, 2026 |
|---|---|
| A tumour visible on mammography has been developing nine or ten years; thermography may see something at year one, two or three. | Early warning of up to ten years before other methods. |
| Combining thermography with mammography and ultrasound might reach around 90% accuracy. | 95% of early-stage breast cancers detectable using a multimodal approach. |
| Heat from asymmetrically dilated vessels, attributed to angiogenesis supporting a developing tumour. | Detection of abnormal blood vessel formation supporting breast disease before a tumour can be found. |
| No radiation, no compression, patient simply sits in front of the camera. | Non-invasive, radiation-free, no compression. |
| Risk should be assessed and then acted on — if a woman is high risk, find where the risk is coming from, and ask whether it is hormonal. | A published case moving from one risk grade to a lower one after hormone balancing, with an invitation to book a consultation to lower your grade. |
Twice in the interview he tells listeners that there is truly no downside to this type of testing
. The reasoning offered is that nothing is irradiated and nothing is compressed — the patient sits in front of a camera, and it is simply additional information. How, he asks, could additional information be bad for a patient or her physician?
It would be easy, and dishonest, to quote only the aggressive half of this interview. He also said the following, and a reader is entitled to weigh it.
Our reading of those hedges, offered as argument rather than fact.
They are real, and we would rather print them than be accused of hiding them. But notice where they sit. Within the same conversation, minutes apart, the listener is told both that this is not a replacement for mammography and that it sees what mammography, ultrasound and MRI cannot. Both cannot do equal work. The first is the sentence you point to when challenged. The second is the sentence that sells the scan.
We think that structure — a disclaimer for the record and an unanswerable claim for the customer — is the whole industry in miniature, and that it explains why twenty years of advisories, evidence reviews and payer determinations have changed so little. Nothing in the hedge is falsifiable and nothing in it is what the patient remembers.
Our press record sorts nineteen newspaper items into three streams: advertising space, editorial that read like advertising space, and journalism that actually checked. Broadcast is a fourth stream, and this item sits at the far end of it.
The programme described itself as truth radio. The host, who styled himself on air as an oracle of truth, spoke throughout about his gift: he told listeners he could know what a person was thinking without their being present, that distance was no obstacle, that he knew what they had thought a year earlier and what they had thought as newborns, and that healing comes from the creator rather than from physicians. Over the course of the show the conversation also took in religion and foreign policy.
| Speaker | Words | Share of the transcript |
|---|---|---|
| Host | 10,968 | Roughly two-thirds |
| Announcer / co-host | 4,170 | About a quarter |
| The guest | 2,520 | Under one seventh |
The host spoke more than four times as much as the guest he had invited on to explain a medical technology. Nobody in the studio was equipped to test a single claim, and nobody tried. This was not an interview that failed to challenge its subject; it was not an interview.
The most consequential thing in this broadcast may be the man who is not in the studio.
The guest was introduced as the right-hand man of a named physician — an obstetrician and gynaecologist described on air as having practised for thirty-seven years, who had appeared on the same programme weeks earlier, and who had opened a women's wellness centre focused on breast cancer. The thermography clinic, listeners were told, was right next door. The host said that this physician was a medical doctor, that he could look at a thermography report, and that he could order further blood work.
That physician is Dr Alvin Pettle, a University of Toronto graduate of 1969, certified in obstetrics and gynaecology by the Royal College in 1974, who describes himself as the Canadian pioneer of bioidentical hormone therapy and who runs a Toronto wellness centre named in memory of his mother, who his own published material says died of breast cancer.
Because this site has been asked about his regulatory history, we went to the College's public register and read it rather than repeat what is said about him. As at 27 July 2026 it records the following.
| Field | Entry |
|---|---|
| Member status | Active since 26 June 1970 |
| Registration class | Restricted, as from 15 August 1995 — over thirty years |
| Original restriction | Terms and conditions imposed by the Registration Committee, 15 August 1995 |
| Later amendment | Terms and conditions amended by the Executive Committee, 10 February 1999 |
| Subsequent amendments | 2006, 2008, 2010, 2021 and 2022 — each recorded as amended by Member, that is, on his own undertaking |
| Published condition | From 4 December 2006, by undertaking, he relinquished prescribing privileges for narcotic drugs and narcotic preparations under Schedules I to IV of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act |
| Past tribunal proceedings | No information available |
| Current tribunal proceedings | No information available |
Two further things the register does not tell us, which we therefore do not assert: it gives no reason for the 1995 restriction, and it gives no content for the 1999 amendment. Those are blanks in the public record, and we would welcome documents that fill them.
The point that does not depend on any of that. Strip out the regulatory history entirely and something important remains. In 2006 a Royal College certified gynaecologist was running a women's wellness centre next door to a thermography clinic, was described on air as the operator's close associate, and was available to review the resulting reports and order further tests.
That is clinical cover. It is what allows an unvalidated infrared test to sit inside something that looks, to a woman walking through the door, like medicine. Every regulator's null finding documented on this site — no discipline, no penalty, no enforcement — is easier to understand once you notice how rarely the arrangement requires anybody to do anything a regulator would recognise as wrong.
One small detail closes the circle. On air in 2006 the host gave the address of the wellness centre, and said the thermography clinic was immediately next door. The number he gave is the same street number at which the thermography company is registered today, two decades later. The physician's own registered practice address, according to the College register, is now a different building on the same street — so we make no claim that the two remain neighbours.
The thermography operation has not moved. It has grown outward from that address into other provinces and other countries, and into mobile clinics visiting towns that have no cancer centre at all.
The broadcast: a complete transcript of a programme dated 11 June 2006, supplied to QuackeryWatch by a reader together with the filename of the corresponding audio recording. Word counts by speaker were computed from the transcript. No part of the transcript is reproduced on this page beyond a single short quotation.
The register: College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, public physician register, certificate number 22872, read 27 July 2026. The register is public and can be searched by anyone at the College's website; readers are encouraged to check it for themselves rather than take our summary on trust.
The 2026 advertising, the network structure and the training relationship are documented, with sources, on our network page. The evidence on the technique is on the overview. The regulatory record is in the tables.
If any person named on this page believes we have described a document inaccurately, write to us and we will check our description against the document and correct anything we have got wrong. We are particularly interested in the terms imposed in August 1995 and amended in February 1999, which the public register does not set out.