Dubious Rx · Ontario · Breast thermography
A 2018 complaint about a breast cancer screening technique Health Canada had warned about six years earlier. No adverse finding was ever made — and the service is no longer advertised.
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Brenda Tapp has not been found guilty of professional misconduct by the College of Naturopaths of Ontario or by any tribunal. She has never been referred to the College's Discipline Committee and does not appear on the College's published discipline outcomes. She holds an active Ontario licence and continues to practise.
QuackeryWatch filed a complaint about her advertising in 2018. We were never sent the committee's decision, and we do not assert what it was. The allegations below are allegations we made. Nobody has adopted them.
We also record, below, that breast thermography does not appear in the clinic's current advertising. We make no claim about why.
On 5 February 2018 the College of Naturopaths of Ontario received a complaint from Terry Polevoy, MD about Dr. Brenda Tapp, ND of Peterborough. It was acknowledged two days later by Deputy Registrar Jeremy Quesnelle and assigned file 18-003. The College summarised the allegations as:
The complaint had also raised chemosensitivity testing. The College's acknowledgment letter noted that information about chemosensitivity testing was not, at that point, available on the member's website, and asked the complainant to provide any relevant material he had.
Thermography — also sold as thermal imaging, infrared imaging, or digital infrared thermal imaging — uses an infrared camera to map skin temperature across the chest. The resulting image is read, usually by a third party and often in the United States, and returned to the client for a fee. The pitch is that increased blood flow shows up as heat, and that heat can flag a tumour years before a mammogram would find it.
There is no evidence it can do this. The claim has been examined for decades and has never held up.
On 27 November 2012 a CBC News investigation identified dozens of Canadian clinics offering thermography for breast examinations. The next day, 28 November 2012, Health Canada issued a public advisory stating that no thermography machine had been approved to screen for breast cancer in Canada, that it was not aware of any clinical evidence that thermography works as a screening technique for early detection, and that thermography may present a potential risk to women relying on the results. It reminded consumers that these machines are not a replacement for routine screening. Health Canada issued a further alert to the same effect in 2017.
It is that 2012 advisory, by date, that the College named in its summary of the allegations.
A false negative is the obvious danger: a woman who is reassured by a clean thermogram and does not pursue a mammogram, or ignores a lump. The false positives cause a different kind of damage. As the Canadian Association of Radiologists put it during the 2012 coverage, women sent on by thermography results arrive needing ultrasounds and mammograms they did not need, displacing patients who did.
An oncologist interviewed at the time described trying thermography in the 1970s to see whether it could replace mammography or other techniques. The pictures, he said, were always nice to look at. They did not work.
Regulatory attention around 2012 was not limited to Health Canada. A thermography clinic in St. John's was told by the Newfoundland and Labrador health minister to stop, on the basis that thermal imaging for breast screening was unregulated in the province, and a Winnipeg clinic was directed by Manitoba's health minister to halt operations pending investigation.
The regulatory shape of the problem is familiar. Health Canada licenses the sale and importation of medical devices, not their use by practitioners. A thermal camera that has never been licensed to screen for breast cancer can still be bought and pointed at patients. What reaches the practitioner is the health regulatory college's advertising standard — which is why a complaint like this one is framed around advertising rather than around the device.
Under the Health Professions Procedural Code a panel is required to dispose of a complaint within 150 days and to provide the complainant with a written decision and reasons, unless the matter goes to discipline. No decision was received here.
What can be established is where it did not go: Tapp's name does not appear on the College's discipline outcomes, which list every naturopath referred to a hearing since the College was created in 2015. So the committee did not refer this for a hearing.
Beyond that, the record closes. Of the outcomes available to the Inquiries, Complaints and Reports Committee, only a caution delivered in person and a specified continuing education or remediation programme are published on the public register. A letter of advice, a letter of counsel, an "other action," or a decision to take no action leaves nothing a member of the public can find.
Current status, checked July 2026
The Peterborough Centre of Naturopathic Medicine, where Tapp — now practising as Dr. Brenda Tapp Leonard — is clinic director, does not list breast thermography among its services. Its current public service listings cover naturopathic medicine, integrative oncology, intravenous nutrient therapy, laser and LED therapy, acupuncture, homeopathy and mistletoe (Viscum album). Chemosensitivity testing does not appear either.
We do not know when thermography was dropped, or why, and we do not attribute it to the complaint. We record it because it is the current fact and because a page that omitted it would be misleading.
Tapp grew up in Peterborough, took an honours bachelor of science in biology at Trent University, and graduated from the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine. She returned to Peterborough to open her practice and now directs a multi-practitioner clinic with a satellite location in Millbrook. She is a member of the Oncology Association of Naturopathic Physicians and describes her work as sitting at the intersection of conventional cancer care and evidence-informed naturopathic medicine.
The clinic's own marketing leans hard on the language of evidence: exceptional and evidence-based natural therapies, natural therapies validated by clinical research, active Ontario licensure for the whole team. Readers should weigh that language against the specific therapies offered alongside it — mistletoe as a cancer therapy and intravenous nutrient therapy both sit some distance from the evidence base the phrase implies. The clinic is also listed in at least one online directory of alternative cancer treatment centres.
None of that is a finding of misconduct, and it is not offered as one. It is the ordinary work of reading a clinic's advertising against the claims it makes for itself, which is what the College's advertising standard asks naturopaths to do before they publish.
What we could not verify. We do not have the clinic's 2018 website as it then stood, and have not retrieved an archived copy. We do not know the outcome of complaint 18-003, and nothing here should be read as asserting one. We have not reviewed printed material, office signage, or social media accounts.
Concerned about a naturopath in Ontario? The College of Naturopaths accepts complaints from anyone — you do not have to have been a patient. Its process is described at collegeofnaturopaths.on.ca. This is a general public resource. Complaints about a medical device itself go to Health Canada's Health Products and Food Branch Inspectorate.
Corrections. If anything here is inaccurate, write to us and cite the record. We will correct it.