About MDTherapy

Ontario has a genuinely confusing answer to a simple question. Therapy delivered by a physician is insured under OHIP with no fee to the patient. Therapy delivered by a registered psychotherapist or a psychologist in private practice generally is not. Separately, the province funds several programs that are free to use but are not billed to OHIP at all. Three different funding routes, one word: therapy.

The result is that people pay out of pocket for care they could have received at no cost, or conclude that free care does not exist. Most of the pages that answer this question online are written by clinics that sell private therapy, carry no sources, and have not been updated in years.

We think the useful thing to build first is not another clinic, but an accurate map: what is covered, by whom, under which rule, and how to reach it.

• Primary sources first. Coverage questions are settled against the Ministry of Health Schedule of Benefits and Ontario government sources, not against what other websites say. Every page lists what it relied on.
• We publish uncertainty. If we cannot confirm something, the page says so. We do not invent wait times, availability, or referral rules.
• Dates mean a person looked. The review date on a page moves only when someone rechecked its sources.
• No paid placement. No organisation can pay to be listed, ranked higher, or described differently.

The detail is in our editorial, medical review and corrections policy.

• An explanation of what OHIP covers for therapy in Ontario, including the actual rule in the Schedule of Benefits.
• The coverage rules and fee codes in detail, transcribed from the current Schedule and dated to its version.
• A guide to medical psychotherapy, therapy delivered by a physician, the insured route that almost nothing online explains to patients.
• A guide to Ontario Structured Psychotherapy, the province's largest source of free structured therapy.

Do not send us personal health information. We cannot act on it and we do not want it. Nothing on this site asks you to describe your health, and there is no form, no account, and no sign-in anywhere on it.

• No advertising or tracking. The site carries no advertising network, no social media pixels, no third-party trackers and no cross-site identifiers.
• No cookies set by us. The site sets no cookies of its own, which is why you are not asked to accept any.
• No account and no personal data collected on the site. We have no login, and we do not ask for your name, email or health details in order to read anything here.
• Email. If you email us, we hold your message and address only for as long as it takes to deal with it, and we do not add you to any mailing list. Please leave out personal health information.
• Server logs. Our hosting provider records ordinary technical information about requests, such as an internet address, timestamp and the page requested, to keep the site running and secure. We do not use it to build a profile of you.
• Links out. When you follow a link to a hospital, programme or government site, that organisation's own privacy practices apply, not ours.

If we later add analytics, we will choose a privacy-preserving option, say so on this page before it goes live, and describe exactly what it records. To ask what we hold about you, or to ask us to delete an email you sent, contact us.

MDTherapy is a healthcare brand in an early stage. If it ever becomes a provider of care, that will be stated plainly on this page and across the site before any care is offered, and the site's structured data and disclosures will change with it. Until then, treat every page here as information only.