by Christian Walters
Been awhile since I wrote here, but I've been fighting a medical issue that's sort of gripped my mind: thyroid cancer. It has a way of grabbing your attention by the head and giving it noogies until you don't have the energy to properly mock a prosperity cult.
So researching cancer led me to Lorraine Day. She was once an actual doctor, rising to seemingly distinguished posts, such as Vice Chairman of the Department of Orthopedics at UC San Francisco, and Chief of Orthopedic Surgery at San Francisco General Hospital. She also claims to be a world-renowned AIDS expert, which makes her claim that AIDS can be transmitted through kissing sort of interesting. Sounds like you become an AIDS expert if you learn medicine from Bill Frist.
Anyhow, she has a cure for cancer that would totally turn modern oncology on its head if any cancer victims who tried it ever lived long enough to be in a study. Let me compare and contrast:
- "Traditional" or "Real" medicine: Surgery and radiation
- Lorraine Day's cure: Prayer and beets*
*Cure not valid for Jews
*Also, cure only valid for cancers caused by beet deficiency
As you might guess, there are naysayers out there. Probably beet-hating Jews who think Lorraine is a seriously unbalanced crackpot that will drive innocent people into horrible, agonizing deaths. With bright pink tongues.
Not that surgery is any fun. I didn't find out about the beet option in time to skip surgery because my subscription to Batshit Weekly lapsed. When I was lying awake and immobile in my hospital bed at 2am watching Crocodile Dundee twice in a row, I realized that horrible, agonizing deaths get an unfair rap.
Big Beet vs. Big Medicine. No one wins, except Big Medicine.
Still, Lorraine has her detractors. No one of consequence, really:
- Dr. Dean Edell
- Dr. Stephen Barrett (from Quackwatch)
- The FDA
- The FTC
- The Seventh Day Adventists (you know how they are, with their fierce dedication to the scientific method)
Did Lorraine become a cowed, frothy, libelous, self-aggrandizing harridan? NO, she was NOT cowed! No, she is striking back with PRAYER! That will bring the FDA to its knees.
Lorraine's other website is a little unconventional for a woman of science. You can learn about the Jews, of course, but also the New World Order, how cola drinks are used in pesticides, why traditional cancer treatments drive people to suicide (damn you, Crocodile Dundee), and pretty much everything else you'd ever want to know. Except what makes an orthopedic surgeon a cancer expert, and why you would trust anything this weirdo says.
Oh wait. She allegedly got cancer, although even that is shrouded in mystery. As near as I can tell, she was holding a beet when she realized it had gone into remission. I sometimes wonder about Ted Nugent's book Self-Gratify Your Brain Damage Away.
My own treatment has gone well and it looks like I'll completely recover. I haven't licked a beet in decades, and I didn't have to become a Holocaust denier. Dean Edell still likes me, in the sense that he's never been mean to, or heard of, me.
Yet I can't help but wonder about Lorraine, being abused by Big Pharma, Big Scien, and... umm... Big Common Sen just because people who follow her advice will die. Just in case, though... go long in beet futures.
Christian Walters lives, loves, and drives in the Atlanta area. He's a technical writer by training, and a Rock Band Adonis by nature. He has honed his reviewing skills on bad movies, which are as rare as pollen grains these days. He has always been a fan of science, and has studied it as much as he could by flinging a Frisbee around campus while getting a liberal arts degree. You can find his personal blog, The Man Version, right here.
