QuackeryWatch · Bad Devices
← Back to QuackeryWatchBreast thermography in Canada is not a scatter of independent local operators who each happened to buy a camera. It is a network, run from one office in Toronto, where one man reads the images and writes the reports. Nobody licenses any part of it.
This page began with a clinic eight kilometres from where this site is written. It advertises breast scans in Kitchener, Ontario, and runs mobile clinics into Goderich, Listowel and Leamington. Following it back produced something more useful than one storefront: a structure.
Local technicians take the pictures. The pictures go to Toronto. In Toronto they are read, and a report comes back. The certificates the technicians hold are issued by private associations that no government created and no government oversees. And the machine at the centre of it has never been the subject of a single enforcement action in this country.
Thermography Clinic Kitchener Inc. operates from Belmont Village in Kitchener and offers breast scans, cranial, dental and thyroid scans, full-body scans and wellness consultations, with mobile clinics in three other Ontario towns. Its breast page is headed as breast cancer prevention and risk assessment.
What that page sets out, in its own terms: that infrared images are analysed and rated to determine the risk of developing breast cancer; that the method identifies abnormal blood vessel formation supporting breast disease long before a tumour can be detected; that it rests on more than forty years of clinical use and over eight hundred peer-reviewed studies; and that ninety-five per cent of early-stage breast cancers can be detected when thermography is used together with clinical examination and mammography. A persistent abnormal thermogram is described as thought to be the single greatest indicator of risk, and as ten times more important than a positive family history.
The page grades the reader's breasts on a TH scale, illustrated with thermal images. TH 1 is lowest risk, TH 2 low, TH 3 medium with hormonal influence, TH 4 high — the last illustrated with a biopsy-confirmed cancer.
Readers of our press record will recognise that scale immediately. It is the same TH grading system set out approvingly in Hospital News in December 2003, in an article distributed inside Canadian hospitals, where the lowest grade was presented as reassurance that tissue activity was normal and the reader was told to come back in a year. That is the false negative, described as a feature. Twenty-three years later the same scale is on a storefront website in Waterloo Region. The ninety-five per cent figure is not new either — it appeared in a 2016 newspaper advertorial in Midland, Ontario, signed by a chiropractor.
The Kitchener clinic's own about page states that its director trained in 2008 with Alexander Mostovoy at Thermography Clinic Inc. in Toronto, and that she is certified through the International Academy of Clinical Thermography. She is a breast cancer survivor who previously worked as an education assistant; her co-owner is a registered nurse. We describe them by role rather than dwelling on them, because they are not the story. The training line is.
Because the same line appears everywhere.
| Location | What the site or listing says |
|---|---|
| Toronto (head office) | Thermography Clinic Inc., founded 1999 by Alexander Mostovoy, DHMS, BCCT, founder and chief executive. Staff include a manager and technician also described as a clinical thermography trainer. |
| Kitchener, ON | Director trained in 2008 with Mostovoy in Toronto. Mobile clinics listed for Goderich, Listowel and Leamington. |
| Milton, ON | Clinic director and a registered nurse technician both described as having trained at the Toronto clinic under his direct training and supervision. |
| Niagara Region, ON | Listed as a member clinic of the same association. |
| Sarnia / Windsor, ON | Listed as member operators of the same association. |
| Montreal, QC | Technician described as having trained at the Toronto clinic under his direct training and supervision. |
| Alberta | Clinic director, a registered nurse, described as having completed thermography training in Toronto under him. |
| Other Canadian provinces | The company's own locations page lists British Columbia and New Brunswick in addition to the above. |
| Outside Canada | The same locations page lists the United States, Colombia, Ireland and Panama, plus mobile clinics. The company site also carries a business opportunity page. |
Read the wording across those sites and the repetition is the point. Several use near-identical phrasing about direct training and supervision. This is not a coincidence of independent businesses arriving at the same technology. It is a system with a centre, a training pipeline and a recruitment page.
Here is the fact that matters most on this page, and it comes from a network clinic's own description of the arrangement rather than from us.
The Toronto company supplies imaging and reporting services to clinics, and Mostovoy reviews the images and provides the reports. Technicians in Kitchener, Milton, Montreal, Alberta and further afield capture the pictures. The interpretation happens at one desk.
Consider what that means for a woman in Goderich. A mobile unit visits her town. A technician certified by a private association takes infrared images of her breasts. Those images travel to Toronto, where they are read by a man whose qualification, as he publishes it, is a doctorate in homeopathic medicine from the Homeopathic College of Canada together with board certification in clinical thermography from a private body. A report comes back rating her risk of developing breast cancer.
At no point in that chain does the file pass a physician, a radiologist, a hospital, a provincial health authority or a regulator of any kind. There is no requirement that it should. That is not an accusation against anybody in the chain. It is a description of the chain.
The credentials that appear throughout this network — certified thermography technician, clinical thermographer, board certified — are issued by private organisations. The two that recur are the International Academy of Clinical Thermography and the Canadian Association of Clinical Thermography. Neither is a statutory regulator. Neither was created by legislation, neither can compel a member to do anything, and neither can strike anybody off in a way that stops them practising, because there is nothing to be struck off from.
This site has documented the pattern before. Our press record notes practitioners being certified to write and interpret breast thermography reports after roughly three days of training by a private body trading under the name of a college. The word does a great deal of work. A woman reading that her technician is certified, and that her images are read by a board certified thermographer, is being told something true and something almost entirely without meaning at the same time.
Set against that network, the entire Canadian regulatory record on this device is short enough to put in one table. Every line is documented on our regulation tables page, which carries the citations.
| What | When | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Federal health technology assessment (CADTH) concludes the evidence does not support screening use | March 2012 | No regulatory action followed for eight months |
| National television broadcast on breast thermography | 27 November 2012 | Advisory issued the following day |
| Health Canada advisory | 28 November 2012 | Published |
| Three measures announced alongside it — a border alert, letters to manufacturers, notice to the provinces | November 2012 | No published outcome located for any of the three |
| Enforcement action naming a thermography device | — | None located |
| Financial penalty against any seller, importer or operator | — | None located |
| Discipline by any Canadian health regulatory college naming a member over breast thermography | — | None located |
| Clinics advertising breast thermography in Ontario today | 2026 | Operating, with mobile units into small towns |
Thirteen and a half years have passed since the advisory. In that time the department has not, so far as any published record shows, penalised a single operator, named a single device, or reported the result of any of the three measures it announced. What it did was publish a warning and move on.
Everything below this line is our opinion. Everything above it is checkable, and a reader who rejects our conclusions can still use the tables.
We say the Medical Devices Directorate has failed at the one task that mattered here, and that the failure is ongoing.
The case against it is not that officials were unaware. Canada's own federal assessment agency reviewed the evidence in March 2012 and found nothing to support screening use. The department produced no response until a television programme aired eight months later, and then produced one the very next day. An institution capable of acting within twenty-four hours of a broadcast, but not within eight months of its own government's evidence review, is telling you what it is responding to.
Nor is the case that the department lacked powers. It has the power to seize, to order removal from Canada, to require destruction at the owner's expense, to stop sales and stop importation. It has used those powers in other device matters — unlicensed cosmetic lasers drew a guilty plea and fines of more than sixty-eight thousand dollars. The powers exist. They have simply never been pointed here.
And the case is not that the harm is theoretical. The mechanism is documented in this section from the promoters' own literature: a low grade on the scale is offered as reassurance, and the woman is told to come back in a year. Where that reassurance is false, the cost is the interval — months or years in which a cancer grows while its owner believes she has been checked. The regulator that could have closed that gap in 2012 instead published a notice, and the notice has not stopped a single clinic from advertising the same claims today, in the same province, using the same grading scale that was in print before the advisory was written.
An advisory that is never followed by an enforcement action is not enforcement. It is publication. The department published, and then left the field to the industry it had warned about, and the industry has spent the intervening decade opening mobile clinics in small towns where there is no cancer centre and no radiologist to ask.
We think that record should be examined publicly, by a parliamentary committee or by working journalists with the power to compel an answer that a website cannot. The specific questions are in the next section.
A normal thermogram is not evidence that you do not have cancer. An abnormal one is not evidence that you do. If you have found a lump or noticed a change, an infrared scan is not the test that will answer it — see a physician, and ask for the imaging your physician recommends. If you have already had a scan and were told you are at low risk, that result should not delay anything your doctor has advised.
This site cannot give medical advice and is not attempting to. It can tell you what the published evidence says, which is on our overview page, and what to do if you want to complain about something you have seen advertised, which is on our regulation tables page.
Businesses and network: the published websites of Thermography Clinic Kitchener Inc. (breast scans page and about page), Thermography Clinic Inc. of Toronto (locations pages), Thermography Clinic Milton, a Montreal clinic, an Alberta clinic and a further Ontario network clinic, together with the members list of the Canadian Association of Clinical Thermography, all consulted 26 July 2026. Page modification dates where visible range from 2024 to 2026. Descriptions of staff training, credentials and services are those the businesses publish about themselves.
The 2003 trade-press article, the 2016 advertorial and the private certification finding are documented with full citations on our press record page.
The CADTH assessment, the November 2012 advisory and the three announced measures, the null findings on enforcement, penalties and college discipline, and the cosmetic-laser prosecution used for comparison are documented with full citations on our regulation tables page.
The lead for this page arrived as an answer generated by an AI chatbot. We do not treat such answers as sources and did not use it. Every factual statement above was verified afterwards against the businesses' own published material, and this note is here because readers are entitled to know how a page came to be written. On an earlier occasion a chatbot answer supplied to this site proved to have misidentified one of three devices it named.
We correct errors on the record rather than quietly. If any business named here believes we have described its published claims inaccurately, write and we will check it against the page as published and correct anything we got wrong. If Health Canada wishes to answer any of the questions above, we will publish the answer in full and without commentary.