Lorraine Day
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Lorraine Jeanette Day is a practitioner of alternative medicine who claims to have discovered the cause and cure of cancer, as a result of God showing her how to recover from her own cancer with a 10 step plan. According to her theory, all cancers are due to weakness of the immune system which must be cured by diet. "All diseases are caused by a combination of three factors: malnutrition, dehydration, and stress." A former surgeon, she is now completely opposed to mainstream medicine, claiming that "the entire foundation of conventional medicine is based on ERROR," that standard cancer treatment has never cured anyone, and that nobody should undergo chemotherapy or radiation treatment for cancer or vaccination for infectious disease. She also rejects the common medical theories regarding the causes and cures of ADHD, SARS, anthrax, smallpox, bird flu, and vision problems. Her theory implicates many common foods as harmful, such as "sugar is as addictive as cocaine" and "paralyzes the immune system for four hours" and "the more milk you drink, the more osteoporotic you become." She maintains that "Drugs never cure disease; they only change the form and location of the disease," that getting conventional medical care and taking prescription drugs are a betrayal of God, and that cancer patients cannot get well if they work or watch television. She maintains a website where she markets books, videotape, and alternative medicines such as Barley Green. In 2004, she began marketing her "Cancer Doesn't Scare Me Anymore" videotape with an infomercial which was declared to be "misleading" by the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus in December, 2004.
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[edit] Biography
Day graduated from the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine in 1969 and trained in orthopedic surgery at two San Francisco hospitals. She became an associate professor and vice chairman of the Department of Orthopedics at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and chief of orthopedic surgery at San Francisco General Hospital. During the mid-1980s, she received considerable media attention related to the risk of acquiring AIDS through exposure to the blood of AIDS patients during trauma surgery, publishing a book, AIDS: What the Government Isn't Telling You, wherein she states that in 1989 she retired from surgery due to the excessive risk of acquiring AIDS.
Day's website, books, and videos describe the experience with cancer which led to her conclusions regarding disease. In 1992 she noticed a small lump in her breast, but did not seek medical care for another year. The pathology report from her excisional biopsy on October 26, 1993, posted on her website, reports a 1.7 centimeter tumor containing an infiltrating ductal adenocarcinoma extending to the margins of the biopsy specimen. Her medical report from November 2, 1993 advised removal of a wider chest area as well as the lymph nodes in her armpit, followed by radiation treatment, but Day decided on only the surgery. After the surgery she began eating a strict vegetarian diet, eliminated all refined sugar and processed foods, and began drinking large amounts of vegetable juice. When her tumor returned nine months later, she realized that "diet was not enough" and tried forty different "alternative methods . . . one after the other".
[edit] Response of mainstream doctors
Mainstream doctors find a great deal of fault with Day's account and advice. They question the validity and possibility of the appearance of the list of symptoms and diseases she describes as having experienced and the possibility of her having survived them based on her reported self-therapy, noting that her website carefully documents only part of her account.
Critics of her videotapes and books point out that in addition to her medical advice, she describes a centuries-old conspiracy for world domination which involves such elements as AIDS, fluoridation, vaccination, pornography, gun control, food irradiation, chemotherapy, radiation treatment, bank centralization, junk food, the medical profession, television programming, computer games, subliminal messages, rock music, the CIA, government food management, the Illuminati, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Cancer Society, DVD technology, television sets which spy on people, the Communist Manifesto (promoted by the U.S. Government), the news media, school textbooks, conspiracy to assassinate both Kennedys, Princess Diana, and Martin Luther King, socialized medicine, melting of the polar ice cap, and plans by NASA to move the Earth further from the Sun; and that even a small amount of television watching serves to destroy the viewer's capacity for rational thought and the ability to see the workings of this conspiracy. They portray an alternate explanation for her recovery; that, on the basis of this belief system and her contradictory history of symptoms, she suffers from emotional illness and psychosomatic illness, the original cancer having been cured by the initial surgery.
Furthermore, even should her story of cancer recovery be true at face value, her critics stress that it does not therefore follow that all cancer patients would also be helped by the same regimen, nor that conventional medicine cannot help and in fact is harmful to all cancer patients; particularly since her story is so medically unique. They describe examples of patients who were influenced by Day's theories, with the result of severe degradation of their medical conditions beyond what would have been predicted had they undergone conventional treatment.
[edit] Involvement in Ernst Zündel deportation case
Day also gained some media attention in an unrelated matter, when she was introduced as a "surprise witness" to testify on behalf of the release of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, imprisoned in Canada while awaiting the result of his deportation hearing. Zündel had claimed to have cured himself of inoperable terminal cancer with the use of herbal remedies, but that the Canadian authorities were withholding this treatment from him causing a relapse of the disease. Day testified in support of this assertion, arguing (unsuccessfully) that he should be released on his own recognizance for health reasons. However, she went beyond merely testifying for the defense, appearing on television to claim that the Canadian authorities "plan to kill him by neglect and keeping him under pressure," and signing a petition stating that "Mr. Zündel is an honest, outspoken man, and he does not deserve to be sent to Germany to face FIVE YEARS in prison merely because he has openly questioned the accuracy and veracity of what many claim to have been an historical occurrence."
