QuackeryWatch · Bad Devices
← Back to QuackeryWatchThe programme that gave the thermographer two hours in June 2006 had run a different guest three weeks before: the physician from next door, alone in the studio. This time nobody was describing him. He was describing himself.
Our page on the 11 June 2006 broadcast notes in passing that the physician next door had appeared on the same programme some weeks earlier. That earlier recording has now been supplied to us. It is dated 21 May 2006, it runs about two hours, and for the whole of the first hour the guest is Dr Alvin Pettle, the Toronto obstetrician and gynaecologist whose women's wellness centre was next door to the thermography clinic.
Three things said in that hour bear directly on how this kind of practice reaches women. He describes the thermographer by name and explains how he came to know him. He describes a breast cancer patient of ten years' standing who had had no surgery, no radiation and no chemotherapy. And the host of the programme, with the physician sitting beside him, tells listeners which doctor to go and see.
Automatic transcription of a two-person studio conversation fails in a particular and dangerous way: when people speak over one another it splits one person's sentence in two and gives half of it to the other speaker. On this recording it did exactly that. So before publishing, the passages this page relies on were listened to and checked against the audio — word by word, and speaker by speaker. Table 1 records which passages were checked and which were not. Nothing here rests on an unchecked passage without saying so.
The transcript is not reproduced, in whole or in substantial part. Quotations are short, and are used only where the exact wording carries something a paraphrase would lose. No allegation of illegality or of professional misconduct is made against any person named on this page.
We set this out first, before any of the content, because it is the reason a reader should give the rest of the page any weight. Two short interjections whose speaker the raw file assigned inconsistently have been left out of this page altogether. They added nothing that the surrounding sentences do not already carry, and dropping them costs the account nothing.
| Timestamp | Contains | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 17:20–17:40 | Dr Pettle on meeting the thermographer, and on the consultation he was given | Checked against audio |
| 19:22–20:09 | The breast cancer patient of ten years, and Dr Pettle's own qualifying sentence | Checked against audio |
| 20:11–20:34 | The host stating that he is not licensed, and his advice on choosing a doctor | Checked against audio |
| approx. 50:00–50:15 | The host on the one doctor he tells people to keep seeing | Transcript only |
| The remaining two hours | Programme framing, biography, sponsors, the retreat announcement | Context only — not quoted |
Explaining how he moved from conventional obstetrics and gynaecology toward what he calls a bridge between that world and holistic healing, Dr Pettle says he met homeopaths — and names Alexander Mostovoy among them, describing him as very spiritual
. He then describes being sat down and questioned for two and a half hours about his own personality, so that a homeopathic remedy could be selected for him. He mentions, with some amusement, being asked which side of the bed he slept on.
This is the earliest first-hand confirmation on record, from either man, that the two knew one another and that a professional relationship of some kind existed between them in 2006. The June broadcast has the host asserting that relationship. The May broadcast has one of the two men describing it himself.
Be precise about what this does and does not establish. It establishes that Dr Pettle was on the receiving end of a homeopathic consultation conducted by Mr Mostovoy. It does not establish that he referred patients for thermography, that he read or relied on thermographic reports, or that he had any financial interest in the thermography clinic. Those are different claims, and this passage does not support them.
What it does support is narrower, and still worth having. Three weeks before the thermographer was given two hours on this programme, the physician next door was already describing him on air, by name, as somebody to whose practice he had personally submitted.
The second passage is the one that matters most, and it has to be set out carefully, because it is easy to make it say more than it does.
Speaking about how his practice changed, Dr Pettle says the medical system we live in is largely built on fear, and that patients are frightened and terrified into doing therapy
that they intuitively know will do them a great deal of damage. He then describes a breast cancer patient who had been coming to him for ten years and who, in his words, has never had any surgery, any radiation, any chemotherapy
. He says she is still alive. He also says, in the same breath, that she looks thin and does not look that well. He attributes her decision to her own conviction that surgery would kill her, and says that this is what she told him.
Then, unprompted, he qualifies it: That's not to say that I'm advocating not to have therapy.
Moments earlier in the same answer he says there is a time and a place for medical therapy, and credits medical treatment with having saved his own child's life.
What remains after the qualification is still substantial. A Royal College certified specialist told a general radio audience that he had a breast cancer patient of ten years' standing who had declined every conventional treatment and was still alive, and framed the discussion around a medical system that terrifies women into therapies that harm them. Listeners do not weigh a disclaimer against an anecdote. They remember the anecdote.
Nothing on this page suggests that Dr Pettle advised that patient to decline treatment. He says the opposite: that the decision was hers, and that she had told him she would not survive surgery. Nor is it possible, from a broadcast, to know anything about her diagnosis, her stage, her prognosis, or what anybody else told her. She is not identified, and no attempt has been made to identify her.
The third passage is not about the physician at all. It is about the programme, and it is the part of the recording that survives every caveat.
Asked what he tells people who want to know whether to have surgery, the host answers that he is not licensed
, and that it is not really an appropriate question to ask me
. That disclaimer is on the tape and it belongs here.
What he says immediately afterwards is that listeners must follow their intuition, and that anyone who does not feel connected to their own intuition should go and find a medical doctor who is — and that his guest's name had come up a great deal, because he is among the very few doctors with that connection. Later in the same broadcast, according to the transcript, he goes further still and says this is the only medical doctor he has ever told people to continue seeing.
Strip out everything else and this remains. An unlicensed practitioner, broadcasting to a general audience, declines to advise on surgery and in the same conversation directs listeners toward one named physician. Whatever else the hour contains, it contains a referral, and the physician was in the studio while it was made.
Our page on the June broadcast makes the point that a certified gynaecologist next door supplies clinical cover for an unvalidated infrared test. This recording shows the traffic running the other way as well.
The broadcast also carries an announcement, given twice. On 2 to 4 June 2006 a fundraising weekend for women was to be held at a lodge in Ontario's cottage country, with proceeds directed to breast cancer. Dr Pettle and the host were both billed as speakers. Registration details were read out on air, and Dr Pettle confirms the dates himself.
Both men say on the recording that this booking is how they first became aware of one another — each had seen the other's name on the same piece of paper — and that the broadcast was the first occasion on which they had met in person.
A weekend event for women worried about breast cancer, at which a Royal College specialist and a man who describes himself as having a gift for discerning truth appeared on the same programme, is not an allegation about anybody. It is a dated fact about how this material was put in front of the public, and it stands without comment.
Dr Pettle's regulatory record is set out field by field, from the College's public register, on our page on the June broadcast. The essential points are repeated here so that this page cannot be read on its own and misunderstood.
The register is public and anyone may search it. We would rather a reader checked it than took our summary on trust.
The broadcast: an archived recording of a two-hour programme dated 21 May 2006, supplied to QuackeryWatch by a reader together with the audio file from which the transcript was made. No part of the transcript is reproduced here beyond short quotations.
Verification: the passages at 17:20–17:40, 19:22–20:09 and 20:11–20:34 were listened to and checked against the transcript before publication, including which speaker said which sentence. The passage at approximately 50:00 has not been audio-checked and is marked as such in Table 1 and in the text. Where the raw transcript was ambiguous as to who was speaking, the passage was excluded rather than guessed at. If any checked passage later proves to have been mis-transcribed, this page will be corrected and the correction noted here.
The register: College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, public physician register, certificate number 22872, read 27 July 2026 and reproduced field by field on the June page.
If any person named on this page believes we have described the recording inaccurately, write to us. We will check our description against the audio and correct anything we have got wrong.