#2991: Kelly Hassberger

Over the years, we’ve provided quite a bit of coverage of the attempts of groups of loons and quacks to gain a sheen of legitimacy for themselves through the process knows as legislative alchemy; i.e., the process of obtaining official stamps of approval for their professions through political decisions about licensure rather than through evidence of safety or efficacy. The benefits for the quacks are (at least) two-fold: first, licenses provide them with an official stamp of approval they can use in their marketing materials (their professions does, after all, receive no support from science or evidence, so they’ve got little else to back their claims to authority with any substance), as well as – sometimes – material gains; second: it provides them with a financially beneficial means of gatekeeping: Being able to determine which practitioners deserve licenses, enable them to guard their territories as they like (since their own advice is not reality-based or assessed for efficacy or safety, it’s not that the people who don’t receive a license provide advice that is any less safe and effective: that is. evidence of safety and efficacy will, as opposed to licensing boards, do shit to protect their turfs for them).

 

Naturopaths have for a long time fought – thus far unsuccessfully, fortunately – to be licensed in Michigan. Now, it would perhaps be inaccurate to call Kelly Hassberger a leader of those efforts, but she was at least one of several naturopaths working “with The Michigan Association of Naturopathic Physicians and state legislators to get practitioners who graduated from accredited doctorate programs in naturopathic medicine to practice as primary care physicians in the state”. Hassberger runs a Naturopathic Health Clinic in Grand Rapids, where she offers customers a wide range of quackery, including but not limited to “homeopathic medicine”. The licensing bills presented before the Michigan legislature (such as the 2013 Michigan House Bill 4152 sponsored by Lisa Posthumus Lyons, who was responsible not only for the 2013 bill but also for the 2016 HB 4531 and whom we have covered before, Ellen Lipton and Joseph Haveman), would, however, provide her with further opportunities to milk her customers – people who genuinely suffer and are desperate, for instance – for cash, “including IV therapy among others, as well as give us the right to accept insurance, run lab testing, diagnose and prescribe prescription drugs when needed.” It might be of note that Hassberger also seems to be running a clinic in Puerto Rico that you should probably stay well away from.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, yet another one of these. There are lots of them and they’re ready to prey on you if you ever find yourself in health-related trouble. But Hassberger also seems to wield some outsize political influence, so she is even scarier than most. She is not a doctor, however.

 

#2990: Jan Harzan

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is among the largest UFO-chasing organizations in the USA. Ostensibly committed to “the scientific method”, they have their own interpretation of what that entails: “Data is collected through online reports …” (which is an interesting take on what counts as data), and a “MUFON Field Investigator then interviews the witnesses who made the report”; in short, they collect anecdotes based on credulous witness interviews. Now, they do rule out a few of these reports as hoaxes; according to “MUFON statistician” David C. Korts, MUFON ends up clearing out about half the reports that people submit, so “I work with a highly filtered, highly clean data set.” So there. They also produce TV shows, like Hangar 1: The UFO Files, aired on that classic go-to source for pseudoscience the History Channel.

 

Jan Harzan, colloquially known as “the Indiana Jones of extraterrestrials”, was director of MUFON for a while. His tenure ended abruptly in 2020 as a consequence of this incident), and the current director appears to be one Douglas Wilson. However, since his name still pops up in connection with UFO conspiracies, Harzan remains deserving of an entry here: Not only a promoter of all sorts of UFO nonsense and conspiracy theories, Harzan also had first-hand UFO experiences on his CV, having at one point been “visited by a real UFO, no more than thirty feet from [his brother and him], with no visible means of propulsion other than making a humming noise, before shooting off over the horizon.”

 

Before his fall from grace, Harzan was one of the most central and sought-after figures in UFO conspiracy circles, and he made numerous TV appearances. He was, for instance, a central character in the ‘documentary’ Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact has Begun (2020), a piece of “fantasy propaganda ... a conspiracy documentary built around the thesis that the ‘national security state’ has concealed it from all of us”, directed and written by Michael Mazzola and which featured a range of prominent UFO conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists (in addition to Harzan), like Steven M. Greer, Daniel Sheehan, and Russell Targ.

 

As for his relationship with scientific methodology, Harzan’s approach is telling enough. Why, for instance, are so many UFO photos blurry? Well, explains Harzan, “UFOs are basically manipulating space-time. And when they do that, it requires a high electromagnetic field. That distorts the images.” So there. Make no mockery of good adhockery. And how should you go about seeing a UFO yourself? “Just being outdoors, being in a quiet place, and thinking about it tends to be one way you could attract these crafts,” said Harzan. “There appears to be some kind of a consciousness connection.” Yes, Harzan believes in ESP, too, of course, as well as, well, most paranormal phenomena you can dream up, apparently, including near-death experiences and even Bigfoot. (“There’s something out there. What creature it is, I have no idea.”)

 

Diagnosis: Yes, he is out of MUFON and others have taken his place. Still.

 

#2989: Steve Harvey

Celebrity loons! Broderick Stephen Harvey is an award-winning American comedian, television host, actor, writer, and producer who apparently hosts things like The Steve Harvey Morning Show, Family Feud, Celebrity Family Feud, Family Feud Africa, Judge Steve Harvey, and (formerly) the Miss Universe competition. Harvey is also proudly religious, to the extent that he believes that those who don’t share his religious commitments can’t coherently be morally upstanding people. More importantly, Harvey rejects any piece of science that he doesn’t perceive to sit comfortably with his religious views, including, of course, evolution. Officially, Harvey rejects evolution on the grounds that it’s nonsense to think that the universe “spun out of a gastrous ball and then all of a sudden we were evolved from monkeys”, for if that were the case, says Harvey, then “why we still got monkeys?” So yes: Among all the stupid creationist arguments to pick from, Harvey went for the very dumbest one of them all.

 

Diagnosis: We suppose many Americans share his opinions, but they tend to have limited broadcasting opportunitites. And imagine getting the opportunity to talk about whatever’s important to you to a large audience and this is what you end up saying!

 

#2988: Lori Harvey

Lori Harvey is an Iowa-based anti-vaccine activist who has made a (little bit of a) name for herself through various antics like ranting at public hearings on legislation concerning vaccines in various Midwest states. Harvey is affiliated with the groups Vaccine-Free Health and Iowans for Health Freedom, and describes herself as an independent researcher on the dangers of vaccines, meaning that she has access to google and peruse various antivaccine and conspiracy websites. And like most conspiracy theorists, Harvey see nefarious financial motives behind support of vaccine. For instance, at a 2013 public hearing held by the Nebraska Legislature’s Education committee on requirements concerning a vaccine against certain types of meningitis, Harvey pointed out that “Sanofi stand to make money from this law being mandated,” and although “their vaccine has been approved by the FDA,” that means nothing since the FDA is just a puppet for Big Pharma as shown by the fact that every “other drug on the market” is FDA approved, too. Just think about it.

 

Part of Harvey’s justification for her opposition to vaccines – and in particular legislation that would make exemptions from, say, school mandates harder to obtain – is, in part, alleged studies allegedly (but not) linking vaccines and autism. According to Harvey, “[a]utism has skyrocketed because of the mandate every single child be vaccinated,” she said, which commits the impressive feat of linking a non-existing phenomenon to a correlation that isn’t there and fallaciously inferring a causal relationship that demonstrably doesn’t exist either.

 

Diagnosis: Local loon who seems to be sufficiently colorful that she might potentially be a liability to her denialist movement rather than an asset. … these days, that suggestion might involve some serious wishful thinking, though.

 

#2987: Aaron Hartman (?)

Aaron Hartman is a Richmond-based family physician who is also one of many (see e.g. last entry on Angelique Hart) who has recognized the financial benefits of incorporating “non-mainstream modalities” into their practices and who, because he has no scruples he has an open mind, has promptly joined the dark side. In addition to his main practice, Hartman sees patients through Richmond Integrative & Functional Medicine, which he launched in early 2017 to target those who are either gullible or somewhat desperate because they can’t find a proper treatment for whatever ails them in conventional medicine, and who has money to spare. As with functional medicine practitioners in general, Hartman offers a range of alternative treatments, including intravenous vitamin C and other supplements. And he’s got anecdotes and marketing glitter to prop up his recommendations (there’s little else).

 

Functional medicine, as we’ve had ample opportunity to note (e.g. here), is quackery: Basically, the idea – insofar as there is a clear idea – is to run a battery of often expensive tests, usually including dubious ones, for anything whatsoever to see if some value along any parameter is unusual. Or, in other words, if you don’t know of anything wrong, they’ll find something. Then they prescribe some unnecessary and often questionable (as in the case of Hartman) treatment regime to address it. Of course it’s lucrative (marketing gambit: the diagnoses and treatment regimes are personalized). And as an added boon, the practitioner will frequently be able to harvest some testimonials, since whatever they addressed was actually not anything that bothered you neither before nor after treatment and you, as a patient, won’t know that it didn’t need addressing and will base your assessment on what the practitioner says.

 

How lucrative? Well, Hartman also offers a membership program – i.e., he runs a quack concierge medical service – which, for the regular plan, requires a membership induction fee of $730 and a monthly maintenance fee of $135 (during the next 12 months of membership); the executive “optimum wellness” plan, however, is a fair $1,500, although it offers, in addition to access to the practice, “advanced testing”, including organic acid analysis, comprehensive stool genomic and functional analysis, nutritional analysis, and something called a “comprehensive vascular biological inflammatory analysis”.

 

Diagnosis: It is, of course, hard to sustain the belief that Hartman is merely a loon, but we’ll tactfully assume that it is. And there are lots of these people out there.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

 

#2986: Angelique Hart

Angelique Hart is an Albuquerque-based MD who has, as so many others, been lured by the lucrative scam of integrative medicine and joined the dark side of altmed grifting. Her website tells us that she “works with each patient to get to the root cause of the problem” (insinuating that conventional medicine generally doesn’t), and it has a prominently placed store section where you can purchase useless but expensive supplements – which should at least deter those aware of the first rule of online medical advice (don’t take it from anyone with a store section on their website) but unfortunately not deter a rather significant target base of potential customers.

 

Hart offers “regenerative & holistic services”, including useless vampire facials and IV nutrient therapies that purportedly help you “[r]ejuvenate, [d]etoxify, and [h]eal from [w]ithin” and which are highly popular among quacks – and yes, she’ll offer the whole range of IV quackery, from Myers’ cocktail and high-dose Vitamin C, to alpha lipoic acid, glutathione therapy, and detox & chelation therapy. Indeed, Hart’s offerings and recommendations encompass an impressive range of questionable methods and quackery, including hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

 

Diagnosis: It’s not like there isn’t a massive number of these, and covering even a sample of them would be a Herculean (and repetitive) task. Hart, anyways, seems to be a relatively prominent representative of these slick marketers of nonsense and bullshit.

 

#2985: Brian Harrison

Brian W. Harrison is an Australian-born, Missouri-based Roman Catholic priest and theologian, emeritus professor of theology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico, and associate editor of Living Tradition, a publication of the Roman Theological Forum hosted by the Oblates of Wisdom in St Louis. Harrison is also, contrary to official Catholic doctrine, a young earth creationist and demonstrably scientifically illiterate.

 

So, according to Harrison, “[i]t is a core element of science that any finding must be reproducible if it is to be valid. Someone must be able to do the same experiment and get the same results. Well, since evolutionary theory plainly lacks that core element, it is not science. The supposed development of all different phyla (macroevolution) from a hypothetical original cell cannot be observed, much less experimentally reproduced.” … which of course demonstrates a misunderstanding of reproducibility and observability that would (hopefully) ensure that Harrison would fail any legitimate high school science class. And if anyone here is actually unsure but don’t dare to ask:

 

-       Yes, science deals with observations. But there is, of course, no requirement that the phenomena described by a scientific hypothesis or theory should be observable – they usually aren’t – but that the hypothesis yields observable predictions. The theory of evolution does – including predictions e.g. on what fossils one will find in various geological strata. Harrison is illiterate.

-       Yes, scientific results should be replicable. But that means that scientists checking your data or scientists using different methods to gather data should arrive at the same conclusions. It does not mean that the hypothesized phenomenon should be repeated – detectives investigating a murder do not need to commit the murder again for their evidence to count. Good grief. Harrison is dazzlingly illiterate and stupid about these things.  

 

Oh, but Harrison has other objections, too: creationism is ruled out by fiat: “One of evolution’s own core elements is the highly debatable philosophical assumption that all observable phenomena are to be explained by natural causes alone, i.e., excluding any appeal to divine intervention or revelation.” Here, Harrison’s misunderstanding is arguably more understandable: Harrison is appealing to the myth of methodological naturalism, that the assumption of “no magic” is some sort of operational constraint on science. And in fairness: We have seen intelligent people who should know better invoke that myth, too. But it is of course bonkers bullshit – and seeing that methodological naturalism is a myth requires only a moment’s reflection (how could science have arrived at quantum mechanics if it were constrained by substantial metaphysical assumptions about causality?). In reality, science is constrained by empiricism: evidence for or against a hypothesis is acquired by checking whether the hypothesis’s observable predicitions are accurate. If you wish to invoke God or magic to explain the development of life, feel free – but what you need, in that case, is an operationalized concept of God or magic that allows you to actually derive observable predictions from your hypothesis (something creationists refuse to do), and then check whether your hypothesis does a better job of predicting and explaining the data than alternative hypotheses. If it does, you win. But no creationist has, of course, ever even gotten close, for obvious reasons (a hypothesis that is sufficiently precise to actually yield predictions is, after all, also a falsifiable hypothesis).

 

Diagnosis: Complete ignorance about a field and confidence in one’s assertion about that field is a pretty common combination. Harrison’s ignorance and illiteracy is spectacular but hardly novel – we have heard his nonsense many times before. Fundie dolt.