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 Bad-MD and Bad-ND: Those sections document physicians and naturopaths 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; in others the complaint ended in advice that carries no penalty and creates no public record. 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 practitioner, it says so explicitly when no disciplinary finding exists.
Treatments and techniques
- 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.
Practitioners
- 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. No disciplinary finding — investigated and cleared
- Dawn Cormier, ND (Stratford, ON) Electrodermal screening (EAV) sold as a highly accurate assessment promising swift and full recovery — while the consent form her patients signed said the same device was investigational only, not diagnostic, and not FDA approved. A 2018 complaint appears to have ended in a letter of counsel, an outcome that never reaches the public register. She has since left the regulated profession for energy healing, beyond any college's reach. The device itself is documented in EAV and the Vegatest; the model named in the complaint is still on sale from a Canadian website today — see The supply chain. No disciplinary finding — never referred to discipline
- Dr. Brenda Tapp, ND (Peterborough, ON) Breast thermography advertised as a screening technique for detecting breast cancer, six years after Health Canada warned that no such machine is approved in Canada, that there is no clinical evidence it works for early detection, and that it may put women at risk. The subject of a 2018 complaint; no decision was ever received. Thermography no longer appears in the clinic's advertising. The technique itself is documented in Breast thermography. No disciplinary finding — never referred to discipline
- Dr. Moshe Dekel, MD (Bohemia, New York) A board-certified obstetrician and gynaecologist with a clean fifty-year licence and no disciplinary history whatever — who advertises a certification from a body that stated on the record that it certified nobody, an affiliation with an industry built on prescribing hormones, a resource page on declining vaccines and masks, and treatment of atrial fibrillation and hypertension without prescription drugs. Four services, one mechanism: a test or a category produces a finding, and the person who produces the finding sells the remedy. He is also the only physician named anywhere by the Canadian thermography network that advertises images examined by Canadian medical doctors — see One reader, many clinics. No disciplinary finding — licensed and in good standing
The machines have their own section. Dubious Rx is about practitioners and treatments. Where the subject is a piece of hardware — a diagnostic instrument sold to practitioners, with its own manufacturers, importers, training channel and regulatory history — it belongs in Bad Devices instead. The distinction matters because a device outlives whoever is operating it this year: it gets rebranded, resold, and taken up by practitioners who never heard of the last action taken against it. Three of the pages above have a counterpart there, and the section now runs to a dozen files covering five device families, the supply chain, the advertising record, two 2006 broadcasts, the enforcement record and the complaint routes.
Related — from the Bad Devices section
- Never for the device itself The argument the whole of that section adds up to. Five devices, two countries, thirty years — and every time one of these machines has been reached by the law, it was reached through some other handle: unlicensed practice, false advertising, elder abuse, import control, a title offence. Nobody has been convicted for selling a diagnosis that does not work. And it is not a limit of the law: a man in South Dakota received nine years for posting people a fake cancer result, and the Competition Act produced $70,000 against a slimming machine in 2006. Start there. Bad Devices
- EAV and the Vegatest Electroacupuncture according to Voll and its descendants — Vegatest, Dermatron, BioMeridian, ZYTO and the rest. Six marketing claims against the record, including the two double-blind studies that tested the Vegatest directly and found it could not separate allergic from non-allergic subjects. Covers Health Canada's 2002 suspension of four Vega licences, the Ontario physician disciplined in part for Vegatest use, and the single anonymised letter of counsel that is the only naturopathic outcome on record. Bad Devices
- Breast thermography Digital infrared thermal imaging sold as breast cancer screening. Seven claims against the record, the November 2012 week in which Health Canada, the CBSA, two provincial health ministers and Quebec's medical college all moved at once, and the years since in which no Canadian enforcement proceeding has followed. Includes the distinction the marketing depends on blurring: these cameras are licensed in Canada to measure skin temperature, like a thermometer. Bad Devices
- The Zapper and the Syncrometer Hulda Clark was born in Rosthern, Saskatchewan. Her two devices were pleaded as devices in a 2003 United States federal complaint, brought under a campaign Health Canada had publicly joined and was thanked by name for assisting. Health Canada itself never named her, never named either machine, and the consumer refunds the settlement produced were for Americans only. Her Canadian division was sold on in 2005 and still offers Syncrometer testing. Bad Devices
- Live blood analysis and darkfield microscopy A drop of blood, a microscope and a screen the patient can watch. The stacked cells are largely an artifact of the glass and the passing minutes; the theory behind the practice was published in 1925 and superseded. Two blinded specialists agreeing at a kappa of 0.35, a prospective study in which it failed to detect cancer, and three criminal convictions abroad — including two under a 1939 statute. In Canada, no proceeding of any kind. Bad Devices
- The supply chain Canada's only accredited naturopathic degree programme teaches none of this — so where did practitioners learn it, and how did the hardware enter the country? A vendor-sponsored education channel operating from British Columbia since 1972; a supplier network that states in writing that its products carry no Health Canada or FDA registration; and a Canadian website retailing electrodermal instruments today, including the exact model named in a QuackeryWatch complaint to the College of Naturopaths of Ontario. Also answers whether Health Canada has ever raided a device warehouse or a practitioner's office. Bad Devices
- The Competition Bureau: the right law, barely used The Competition Act bars any performance claim not backed by testing done beforehand, puts the onus on the advertiser, reaches services and clinics as well as products, and carries penalties to $10 million. Every device action the Bureau has ever taken — three, all weight-loss gadgets sold direct to consumers, none diagnostic, none clinic-based. Includes the Bureau's own published statement of when it defers to Health Canada, and why bioelectrical impedance is a genuinely different case from EAV. Bad Devices
- Who has actually acted? Five reference tables: every provincial naturopathic regulator and what each has done about registrants using these devices; every Health Canada device action; the other Canadian bodies that did act; whether anyone has ever been fined; and what the insurers and public payers who assess tests for a living concluded, the earliest of them in 1984. The headline finding — across six provinces with regulated naturopathic colleges, no published discipline decision naming either device could be located. Bad Devices
- How to complain, and to whom Four federal routes with contact details verified in July 2026, ranked by how useful they actually are — the Competition Bureau, which is the strongest on the evidence and the only one that ever produced a penalty; Health Canada's enforcement branch, with the consumer device form built for exactly this; the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, which is a data repository rather than an investigator; and the Minister of Health, which is political pressure and not a complaint mechanism. Plus the provincial colleges, which the federal bodies cannot reach. Bad Devices
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. Concerns about a naturopath in Ontario go to the College of Naturopaths of Ontario, which accepts complaints from anyone — you do not have to have been a patient. Concerns about a medical device itself go to Health Canada's Regulatory Operations and Enforcement Branch, using the Consumer Medical Device Report Form — older material names the Health Products and Food Branch Inspectorate, which has since been reorganised. Current contact details for that and every other route are set out in How to complain, and to whom. Practitioners in other jurisdictions are overseen by their own provincial, state, or national regulators; practitioners who do not belong to a regulated profession fall outside all of them.