Five unproven diagnostic machines. Three countries. Thirty years. In the Canadian and U.S. enforcement record we located, these devices were generally reached through some other legal handle — unlicensed practice, false advertising, elder abuse, import control, a title offence — rather than through a prosecution framed simply as the sale or use of an invalid diagnostic method.
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.
| Device | Canada | United States | Elsewhere | Ever convicted for the device? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Breast thermography | No prosecution or monetary penalty located No charge, fine or published college decision located. Health Canada issued advisories in 2012 and 2017 and announced manufacturer and border follow-up; we have located no subsequent public report stating what those measures produced. | Letters, one licence At least six FDA warning letters are documented through February 2019, including five earlier letters identified by FDA and the February 2019 Total Thermal Imaging letter. One California chiropractic licence was surrendered in March 2023 — a settlement based on allegations, not an adjudicated finding. No criminal charge located. | Not searched | No |
| EAV / Vegatest | Administrative Health Canada records cited on the individual EAV page indicate that four device licences were suspended in 2002. One CPSO discipline matter is reported on the individual page as involving Vegatest use among broader findings. One anonymised Ontario naturopathic Letter of Counsel is documented. | 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. Indiana had earlier charged Hulda Clark with unlawful practice of medicine in 1993; that prosecution was dismissed in April 2000 on speedy-trial grounds, not on the merits of the medical-practice allegations. | 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 Prominent live-blood-analysis promoter Robert O. Young was convicted in 2016 and again in February 2025; in May 2025 he was sentenced to five years eight months. The 2025 counts included practising medicine without a licence, elder abuse and theft — not a stand-alone prosecution of 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 separate consumer-protection and food-law convictions in April 2018 that resulted in a Criminal Behaviour Order. | Only in the UK |
Read down the last column. In the Canadian and U.S. record we located for these five devices, we found no conviction framed simply as selling or using an invalid diagnostic method itself; the criminal cases we found turned on other offences.
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. Indiana charged Clark in 1993 with unlawful practice of medicine. The prosecution was dismissed on 17 April 2000 on speedy-trial grounds. That disposition did not adjudicate the merits of the medical-practice allegations.
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.
| 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. | May end in a negotiated settlement without an adjudicated finding or admission. | 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. | The administrative measures identified here did not impose a financial penalty for prior sales and generally did not resolve what happened to machines already in use. | 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. | Principally reaches registrants; unlicensed operators generally fall outside a professional college's disciplinary process. | Twice One Ontario physician over twenty years; one California chiropractic licence surrendered in 2023. No Canadian naturopathic decision naming any of these devices. |
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.
| 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. This example shows escalation from civil injunction to criminal enforcement when court orders were defied. 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. This case demonstrates that intentionally deceptive cancer diagnosis can support serious criminal liability when the statutory elements and evidence are present. |
| 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 case demonstrates that the Competition Act can reach unsupported performance representations concerning a health-related device. Our searches located no published Competition Bureau proceeding involving the five devices 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. The case shows that a local trading-standards authority was able to bring repeated enforcement under a purpose-built cancer-advertising offence. |
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.
In the 2006 CBC report, Dr. Mai described thermography as a case of buyer beware. That statement records the regulatory position as she described it then; later Health Canada advisories expressly stated that thermography devices were not authorized for breast-cancer screening and could not be advertised or sold for that purpose.
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 were announced; we have located no subsequent Health Canada report stating what those manufacturer contacts or border measures produced.
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. Closely analogous deceptive health conduct has produced serious criminal prosecutions in the United States — including a nine-year sentence in South Dakota for a fraudulent mail-order cancer-diagnosis scheme. Canadian law also provides routes capable of reaching unsupported performance representations, as the 2006 Cellotherm case demonstrates. 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. The regulatory structure divides responsibility among product regulation, professional regulation and competition law, creating obvious opportunities for gaps in follow-through. The machine in the room may therefore sit at the intersection of several mandates without any single body addressing the whole problem.
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. Several regulatory interventions followed major publicity closely in time; the published record we located contains much less evidence of sustained follow-up afterward. In our view, that pattern is too dependent on episodic outside attention.
We would rather this page went out of date. Four things would do it, and none requires new legislation.
The five machines in the grid all claim to detect something. The pattern is not limited to diagnosis.
Low-intensity shockwave and “acoustic wave” therapy is sold across Canada as a treatment for erectile dysfunction and Peyronie's disease, advertised as “clinically proven” and “Health Canada approved.” The Canadian Urological Association's 2021 guideline states that it is not approved by Health Canada for erectile dysfunction, and recommends against its use. Some shockwave devices are licensed in Canada for indications unrelated to erectile dysfunction. Whether a particular clinic's machine is licensed, and for what indication, depends on the specific manufacturer, model and licence.
This is a different case from the grid in one important respect: unlike the five devices above, shockwave therapy has some evidence behind it. Canada's Drug Agency concluded in 2025 that extracorporeal shockwave therapy may improve clinical outcomes compared with sham or no treatment, while noting limitations in the evidence and variation among treatment protocols. The problem is not that the machine does nothing. It is that the advertising claims a certainty, and an approval, that nobody has granted.
Our searches through October 2026 located no published enforcement proceeding on shockwave therapy for erectile dysfunction by Health Canada, the Competition Bureau, a Canadian provincial health-profession college, the FDA or the FTC.
This page was reviewed to distinguish adjudicated findings from allegations, settlements and administrative measures; to bound negative-search conclusions to the jurisdictions and databases actually searched; and to separate historical regulatory statements from current law.
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.
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.