#2872: Kristi Funk

Kristi Funk is a breast cancer surgeon and founder of the Pink Lotus Breast Center in Beverly Hills who rose to fame for her surgical treatment of celebrities like Angelina Jolie. And although she is apparently a decent surgeon, Funk has a number of dangerous and false ideas about the causes of breast cancer, and she promptly used the spotlight on her after the Jolie situation to spread dangerous misinformation and pseudoscience on the issue, e.g. through her book Breasts: the Owner’s Manual.

 

As Funk sees it, dairy products cause breast cancer, whereas organic foods, berries and cruciferous vegetables reduce the risk – as does, apparently, switching to bar soap and filling your home with houseplants to “absorb toxins”. Needless to say, there is no evidence for any of these claims. For Funk, however, evidence has little to do with anything: Funk is an adherent of the contemporary fad pseudo-religious tenet that whatever is natural (i.e. what counts as natural according to her gut feeling and the target audiences of various glossy magazines) is good and blessed – and like all religions, hers needs an opposite pole and a set of sins associated with the opposition, i.e. stuff that can somewhat arbitrarily be classified as unnatural and which is accordingly impure and bad. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of the pseudo-religious nature of her ideas, is her support for the New Age religious ritual of detoxing as a means to maintain or improve one’s health.

 

Well, she does, in fact, cite real research, too, when making her claims. Unfortunately, she is rather judicious in her selections and disturbingly prone to using irrelevant studies or misrepresenting the results described in the research she cites. For instance, her claim that exercise, avoiding alcohol and smoking and adopting a whole-food plant-based diet may reduce breast cancer risk by 80%, is at best a wild exaggeration and her claims about the effects of dairy and meat on breast cancer risks directly contradict the studies that actually exist.

 

And her cancer center offers plenty of woo, including homeopathic remedies like Arnica Forte to supplement real medicine – their website proudly admits that “integrative medicine is not just a marketing slogan but rather the essence of what we practice”. It’s not merely a slogan, but it is all about marketing.

 

Diagnosis: No, not a particularly wild-eyed superquack, but her attempts to twist and filter scientific findings to support a particular pseudo-religious creed – and not the least her practice’s endorsement of woo – is definitely a matter of concern.