Dr. Zigurts Strauts: A 1996 B.C. Chelation Case That Reached the Court of Appeal — Decades Before Gannage
Twenty years before Ontario's Dr. John Gannage became the public face of chelation-for-children controversy in Canada, a Surrey, B.C. family physician was already fighting his own regulatory college over the same practice. Dr. Zigurts Strauts treated children for suspected heavy-metal toxicity, co-authored a book promoting the treatment, and challenged his college's right to investigate him all the way to the B.C. Court of Appeal. His medical licence is now listed as resigned.
Where the book actually began
Turning Lead Into Gold was co-authored by Strauts and Nancy Hallaway, a North Vancouver registered nurse whose own twin sons, Cameron and Brett, were diagnosed at age three as hyperactive with attention deficit disorder and severe autistic tendencies. Hallaway became Strauts's patient in 1993 seeking help for the boys; he found what the book describes as unacceptable levels of lead, arsenic, aluminum, and cadmium in their bodies, and reported dramatic improvement in both children following chelation treatment. That case — not Scott Hoffard's or Andrew Wandell's — is the spine of the book; the Hoffard and Wandell families came to Strauts afterward, having read it.
Two families, two children, one treatment
In 1996, Surrey mother Janet Hoffard was searching for answers about her toddler son Scott, whose symptoms — diarrhea, poor appetite, anxiety, language delay, and a persistent hand-to-mouth fixation — had gone undiagnosed by several specialists. She came across Hallaway and Strauts's book describing the harms of heavy-metal toxicity and chelation therapy as the remedy. The family's working theory was that Scott had ingested lead from mini-blinds imported from China and purchased at Zellers. After Strauts began chelation treatment, the Hoffards told The Province their son's life had been "turned around."
Around the same time, Port Coquitlam parents Jack and Caroline Wandell brought their son Andrew to Strauts. Andrew had been born healthy in January 1991, but by age two his speech had failed to develop normally, sending the family through years of speech therapy, blood tests, and visits to Sunny Hill Health Centre and B.C. Children's Hospital without a firm diagnosis. After reading Strauts's book in 1995, the Wandells sought his care as well, and later wrote to newspapers defending the treatment in strongly personal terms.
The college investigates — and a public fight breaks out
⚠️ "Appalling" and "immoral"
Dr. Gillian Lockitch, a University of British Columbia pathology professor and director of the trace elements laboratory at B.C. Children's Hospital, publicly condemned the practice in a July 1996 newspaper column, arguing that diagnosing children with invalid tests and treating them with chelating drugs, without adequate monitoring, breached physicians' basic obligation to do no harm. She said the blood-lead threshold Strauts and his colleagues used to justify treatment was out of step with the levels linked to real toxicity, and called for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C. to investigate — which it did.
The College's investigation, and Lockitch's public criticism, drew an organized defence. Croft Woodruff, president of the EDTA Chelation Association of B.C., wrote a rebuttal accusing Lockitch of relying on outdated lead-toxicity thresholds and argued that no one on the College's council was qualified to properly evaluate chelation therapy. The Wandells wrote directly to The Province defending Strauts by name, and a Ministry of Health spokesperson was quoted stating that chelation was an approved treatment for heavy-metal poisoning and that the Ministry saw no issue with its use, so far as the College was concerned. Strauts himself told The Surrey Leader that mainstream medicine underestimated the seriousness of metal toxicity, and that chelation was more widely accepted in the U.S. and Europe than in Canada.
The case that went to the Court of Appeal
Strauts fought the College's access to his records — and lost twice
Rather than cooperate with the investigation, Strauts refused to comply with Rule 14 of the Medical Practitioners Act, which required him to make his patient records available to College investigators. He petitioned the courts for a declaration that the College's investigative resolutions were invalid. A B.C. Supreme Court chambers judge dismissed his petition in 1996 and sided with the College, ordering him to comply. Both Strauts and the College appealed different aspects of that ruling, and in June 1997 the B.C. Court of Appeal (Strauts v. College of Physicians and Surgeons (B.C.), 94 B.C.A.C. 254) dismissed both appeals, leaving the order intact: Strauts was legally obligated to open his records to the investigators.
That ruling settled only the procedural question of the College's authority to investigate and Strauts's duty to cooperate — it did not itself rule on whether his use of chelation on children constituted misconduct. We have not been able to locate any public record of what, if anything, the College concluded once it completed that investigation, or whether any discipline followed. If a reader has that information, we would welcome it.
His current status, per the College's own directory
⚠️ Licence resigned
According to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C.'s public directory (checked July 2026), Dr. Zigurts Strauts's licence status is listed as Resigned, with a licence class of Former and a practice type of family practice. His degree is recorded as an MD from the University of Calgary, 1982. The directory's public notifications section for his profile is empty, and no practice conditions are listed. A resignation is not itself evidence of discipline — physicians resign their licences for many ordinary reasons, including retirement — and CPSBC's own directory policy states that disciplinary actions are only shown if they occurred since January 2000, so anything from the 1996–97 investigation era would not appear here regardless of outcome. A third-party clinic listing describing him as still operating a Surrey vein clinic, referencing a "Fall 2024" flyer, appears to predate or simply not reflect his current resigned status with the College.
What reviewers of the book said at the time
A contemporary book review rated Turning Lead Into Gold "Poor" overall, praising it as very readable while flagging that it contained misinformation and unsupported claims. The review placed it alongside a familiar genre of books that attribute a chronic, multi-symptom complaint several practitioners have failed to diagnose to a single trendy modern affliction. Separately, a listing for the book in the Canadian Book Review Annual notes that both the Canada Council and the B.C. government provided funding toward its publication — a detail we have not independently verified beyond that listing, but which is worth noting given the book's contested medical content.
Magazine coverage
Beyond the newspaper coverage above, the Canadian health and wellness magazine alive later ran a feature, "Lifting the Fog of Autism," discussing chelation therapy for autism and citing a case from the book directly: a pseudonymous "Bobby Smith," a five-year-old with autistic tendencies and seizures of unknown cause since infancy, whose family pursued chelation after heavy-metal testing.
The book didn't stay in 1995
A revised edition, Turning Lead into Gold: Autism, ADD, or Lead Poisoning?, was republished in 2021 under Hallaway's name alone, still centered on Cameron and Brett's story. The new edition carries endorsement blurbs from two prominent figures in the U.S. autism "biomedical" movement: Dr. Bernard Rimland, founder of the Autism Research Institute — the organization behind the Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) protocol this site has documented elsewhere as discontinued by its own founding body around 2010–2011 — and Dr. Doreen Granpeesheh of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders. More than a quarter-century after the original controversy played out in Surrey newspapers and B.C. courts, the book that started it is still in print and still being recommended to parents.
Why this belongs on QuackeryWatch
This case predates Dr. John Gannage's Ontario case by more than two decades and shows the same underlying pattern repeating across provinces and generations: a physician treating children for a theorized, hard-to-verify toxicity, a regulatory college moving to investigate only after outside pressure, and a defence built on the claim that mainstream medicine is simply behind the science. It also illustrates something important about researching this topic: regulatory colleges' public records often stop at the procedural stage — whether a college even has the authority to look — without ever surfacing what was ultimately found, which is a real limitation on ever answering "how many Canadian physicians do this."