Dubious Rx: Unproven, Unapproved, and Unsupported Treatments
This section documents treatments and practitioners operating in the space between conventional medicine and outright fraud: therapies with no supporting evidence, offered under the banner of patient choice and complementary/alternative medicine, that regulators have largely declined to police.
How this differs from the Bad-MD Files: Bad-MD documents physicians found guilty of misconduct, fraud, incompetence, or crimes by a court, college, or tribunal. Dubious Rx is different — the practitioners named here have not necessarily been found guilty of anything. In several cases they were investigated and cleared. The concern here is with the evidence base for the treatment itself, and with a regulatory structure — built around "patient autonomy" and protection for "non-traditional" therapies — that leaves almost no room for a college or tribunal to intervene until a specific patient is demonstrably harmed. Where a page names a specific physician, it says so explicitly when no disciplinary finding exists.
Entries
- Chelation Therapy for Autism Overview: the discredited thimerosal/mercury theory behind it, the clinical evidence (or lack of it), documented harms including a child's death, and how it continues to be offered to families of autistic children in Canada, the US, and Europe.
- Dr. John Gannage (Markham, ON) A Canadian physician who has offered chelation for autism since 1999. Investigated after a formal complaint and cleared by both the CPSO and Ontario's Health Professions Appeal and Review Board — no finding of misconduct. Case study in the regulatory gap.
General resource: If you have a concern about the care or conduct of a physician in Ontario, you can raise it with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario through its Complaints and Concerns process. Physicians in other jurisdictions are overseen by their own provincial, state, or national medical regulators.