Dr. Akbar Khan: Found Incompetent for Treating a Child's Brain Cancer With an Unproven Drug
Dr. Akbar Khan, a Toronto family physician who once practised palliative care, was found incompetent by the Ontario Physicians and Surgeons Discipline Tribunal and had that finding upheld by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in April 2023. Among the findings against him: he prescribed dichloroacetate (DCA) — a drug with no accepted role in oncology, ordinarily used for rare pediatric metabolic disorders — to a pediatric patient for brain cancer (medulloblastoma), with the tribunal finding the evidence and science insufficient to support that use.
From palliative care to alternative cancer treatment
Dr. Khan is a conventionally trained family physician who worked in palliative care until 2007, after which he expanded his practice to combine complementary and alternative medicine with conventional care. He began prescribing DCA — a compound this site has separately documented as a drug whose only anti-cancer research came from University of Alberta rat studies, sold online by unregulated distributors before any human clinical trials were completed — both to adult cancer patients and to at least one pediatric patient being treated for medulloblastoma, an aggressive childhood brain cancer.
⚠️ The tribunal's finding on the pediatric case
The Ontario Physicians and Surgeons Discipline Tribunal specifically found that the evidence and science were insufficient to support using DCA to treat a pediatric patient with medulloblastoma, and concluded Dr. Khan failed to maintain the standard of practice of the profession in doing so. On appeal, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice agreed the tribunal made no error in that finding, and separately noted Dr. Khan had, in at least one case, refused to accept a conventional bone marrow biopsy showing no signs of leukemia or cancer — instead suggesting other possible diagnoses to the patient, including a lower-grade cancer, and prescribing a drug of unproven benefit.
DCA wasn't the only unproven treatment
As his practice expanded further, Dr. Khan began offering cancer patients low-dose naltrexone (LDN) — a drug conventionally used in addiction treatment — as a primary cancer therapy, despite the tribunal finding no evidence base supporting that use either. He also adopted something called "SAFE chemotherapy," a treatment he began offering after meeting its developer, Kenneth Matsumura. The tribunal called it "shocking" that Dr. Khan began treating patients with SAFE chemotherapy based on what appeared to be nothing more than Matsumura's word: Matsumura claimed to have been developing the treatment since 1992, but had never published his findings, and no information was available about outcomes for any patients treated since his original four in 1992.
What the tribunal and court found
- Tribunal decision The Ontario Physicians and Surgeons Discipline Tribunal found Dr. Khan engaged in conduct that could be regarded as disgraceful, dishonourable, and unprofessional; that he failed to maintain the standard of practice of the profession; and that his lack of knowledge, skill, and judgment was serious enough to demonstrate he was unfit to continue practising medicine.
- Informed consent Both the tribunal and the reviewing court found Dr. Khan failed to give patients the information necessary to make informed decisions and give proper consent to treatment with DCA, LDN, and SAFE chemotherapy.
- April 2023 The Ontario Superior Court of Justice dismissed Dr. Khan's appeal, ruling the tribunal committed no palpable and overriding error, and upholding the finding that he was incompetent.
Dr. Khan's own defence argued the tribunal found a breach of a standard of practice that had never been clearly articulated, and that the tribunal improperly treated the CPSO's Complementary/Alternative Medicine policy as establishing a binding legal standard. The court rejected both arguments, holding that the CAM policy — which requires physicians offering non-conventional treatments to ensure they are informed by valid, reliable, and tested science — properly informed the tribunal's assessment of his conduct, even though the policy itself does not carry independent legal force.
Why this belongs on QuackeryWatch
Unlike some other physicians documented in our Dubious Rx section who were investigated and cleared, this is a fully adjudicated case: a discipline tribunal finding of incompetence, upheld on judicial review by a superior court. It's also a direct extension of our existing DCA coverage — naming, with full tribunal and court detail, the Toronto physician that page already referenced. The pediatric medulloblastoma case in particular illustrates a recurring theme on this site: a physician's willingness to treat a real, serious childhood cancer with an unproven substance, justified after the fact by a complementary-medicine framework that still requires — and, in this case, was found to lack — a genuine evidentiary basis.