Manitoba and Newfoundland are the first
two provinces in Canada to send cease and desist letters to clinics advertising thermal imaging scans for the detection of breast cancer,
because the scans don't work. In Ontario, the service is offered in
chiropractic and naturopathic clinics and claims to be a non-invasive diagnostic test that can
detect a tumour in a boob before a mammogram can. The test has raised
some issues in the United States, with the Food and Drug
Administration sending a letter of warning to the Florida based
company Meditherm for advertising it's Med2000 thermal imaging camera as a breast cancer diagnostic tool. Peter Leando, president of
Meditherm, said of the warning, "I think [the FDA's issue with]
the wording was related to 'accurate,' and something else. And we
just changed the words so that it wouldn't be likely to mislead
anybody into thinking that it was accurate in the detection of breast
cancer." This perfectly frank and logical statement was said by
someone who is still trying to sell women on thermographic scans for
the detection of breast cancer.
Meditherm first applied to the FDA for
a licence to sell their thermal imaging cameras as a breast cancer
diagnostic tool in November of 2000 and were denied. They were told
at the time that they could only market the Med2000 as a machine for
taking a thermal image of the human body, nothing more, and that they
couldn't claim it detected breast cancer because it didn't. This did not stop them from advertising the Med2000 as a breast cancer
screening diagnostic tool. Resident expert on Medical Equipment
Ovaltine Goose-Shredder explained the reasoning behind Meditherm's
decision to go ahead with their plan despite being told not to by the
FDA, saying “As any Geiger Counter will show you, Peter Leando's
headstrongness is off the charts. Beyond that, humans are very much
afraid of cancer, so a device that gives no factually useful results
will still be bought by consumers when the company that markets it
asserts that it can detect breast cancer 10 years before a mammogram
can. It's incredible how trusting people are when they're misled into believing a device has the medical community's stamp of approval.”
The FDA has since sent out a warning to
citizens that thermographic scans are not an effective alternative to
a mammogram, and Health Canada has said that it is an unproven
technique that has not yet been licenced. Despite this, women in most
provinces can still go to clinics, pay $200 and start freaking out about a diagnosis that most likely is a false positive. When asked
how they could allow Canadians to utilize a medical diagnostic tool
that is unproven at best and completely unreliable in the opinion of
many medical professionals, a representative from Health Canada
explained that they could only make decisions based on the
information available at the time, saying “We didn't know it wasn't
snake oil.”
Citizen Danny was stopped by Piss
Awesome Journalism Thursday outside the Covent Garden Market and
expressed his outrage at what he perceives to be an evil cash grab by
slimy hucksters. “Holy shit! They try so hard to talk their way
around saying anything specific about thermography, their Q&A
pages are a masters course in evasive language! And if you look up
the source the Sunleite Integrative Health Centre cites to prove
thermal imaging is a valid test for breast cancer it leads to the
International Academy of Clinical Thermology, an organization that
has to put a disclaimer on their website to make sure everyone knows
that “The information found on this web site, and in the IACT
educational courses, are only the expressed opinions of IACT.” They
have no facts. Zero fucking facts and they're trying to convince you
they care about your health. Evil motherfuckers!”
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