Education
Day graduated from the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine in 1969 and trained in orthopedic surgery at two San Francisco hospitals.
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 first became controversial when she began advocating that patients be tested for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome prior to surgery. In recent years she has promoted an alternative cancer treatment program, which has attracted criticism as being "misleading" and "dangerous". 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 her extreme reaction to the risk of acquiring Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome through exposure to the blood of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome patients during trauma surgery.
One action 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, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome: What the Government Isn"t Telling You, wherein she states that in 1989 she retired from surgery because of the excessive risk of acquiring Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Day remarried later to former California congressman William Dannemeyer.
As a promoter of alternative medicine she 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."
In 2004, she began marketing her "Cancer Doesn"t Scare Maine 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.
In 2007 she received an Food and Drug Administration Warning Letter notifying her that her website was illegally marketing a product as a drug. Stephen Barrett wrote on Quackwatch, "In my opinion, her advice is untrustworthy and is particularly dangerous to people with cancer".