Lorraine Jeanette Day is an American author, former orthopedic trauma surgeon and Chief of Orthopedic Surgery at San Francisco General Hospital and promoter of alternative cancer treatments. She first became controversial when she began advocating that patients be tested for AIDS prior to surgery. In the 2000s, she started to promote an alternative cancer treatment program, which has attracted criticism as being generally misleading and dangerous.

Life

Day graduated from the

University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It con ...

School of Medicine A medical school is a tertiary educational institution, or part of such an institution, that teaches medicine, and awards a professional degree for physicians. Such medical degrees include the Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS, M ...

in 1969 and trained in

orthopedic surgery Orthopedic surgery or orthopedics ( alternatively spelt orthopaedics), is the branch of surgery concerned with conditions involving the musculoskeletal system. Orthopedic surgeons use both surgical and nonsurgical means to treat musculoskeletal ...

at two

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

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 public discussions of the risks of acquiring AIDS through exposure to the blood of AIDS patients during

trauma surgery Trauma surgery is a surgical specialty that utilizes both operative and non-operative management to treat traumatic injuries, typically in an acute setting. Trauma surgeons generally complete residency training in general surgery and often fe ...

. One action that she proposed was wearing the airborne protection suit that is usually worn to protect vulnerable patients from a doctor's germs. She published a book, ''AIDS: What the Government Isn't Telling You'', wherein she states that in 1989, she retired from surgery because of the allegedly excessive risk of acquiring AIDS. Day remarried later to former California congressman William Dannemeyer.

Alternative cancer treatment

As a promoter of alternative medicine she claims to have discovered the cause and cure of

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal b ...

, as a result of

God In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'', Oxford University Press, 1995. God is typically ...

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 The immune system is a network of biological processes that protects an organism from diseases. It detects and responds to a wide variety of pathogens, from viruses to parasitic worms, as well as cancer cells and objects such as wood splint ...

which must be cured by

diet Diet may refer to: Food * Diet (nutrition), the sum of the food consumed by an organism or group * Dieting, the deliberate selection of food to control body weight or nutrient intake ** Diet food, foods that aid in creating a diet for weight loss ...

. "All diseases are caused by a combination of three factors:

malnutrition Malnutrition occurs when an organism gets too few or too many nutrients, resulting in health problems. Specifically, it is "a deficiency, excess, or imbalance of energy, protein and other nutrients" which adversely affects the body's tissues ...

dehydration In physiology, dehydration is a lack of total body water, with an accompanying disruption of metabolic processes. It occurs when free water loss exceeds free water intake, usually due to exercise, disease, or high environmental temperature. Mil ...

, and

stress Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition * Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...

." In 2004, she began marketing her ''"Cancer Doesn't Scare Me Anymore"'' videotape with an infomercial. Stephen Barrett of

Quackwatch Quackwatch is a United States-based website, self-described as a "network of people" founded by Stephen Barrett, which aims to "combat health-related frauds, myths, fads, fallacies, and misconduct" and to focus on "quackery-related information th ...

registered a complaint about the content of the infomercial, and subsequently reported that the video had been declared to be "misleading" by the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus in December 2004.

Stephen Barrett Stephen Joel Barrett (; born 1933) is an American retired psychiatrist, author, co-founder of the National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF), and the webmaster of Quackwatch. He runs a number of websites dealing with quackery and health frau ...

wrote on

, "In my opinion, her advice is untrustworthy and is particularly dangerous to people with cancer".

Political and religious opinions

Day has referred to the

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...

as a lie, and she has indicated that she believes that Jewish people wish to "destroy all governments and all religions".

References

External links

*
Transcripts of news reports of Zündel hearing proceedings
{{DEFAULTSORT:Day, Lorraine Alternative cancer treatment advocates American Holocaust deniers American orthopedic surgeons Living people Pseudoscientific diet advocates Women surgeons 1937 births

Life

Alternative cancer treatment

Political and religious opinions

See also

References

External links