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.
