I find a problem with the getDate()/setDate() method is that it too easily turns everything into milliseconds, and the syntax is sometimes hard for me to follow.
Instead I like to work off the fact that 1 day = 86,400,000 milliseconds.
So, for your particular question:
today = new Date()
days = 86400000 //number of milliseconds in a day
fiveDaysAgo = new Date(today - (5*days))
Works like a charm.
I use this method all the time for doing rolling 30/60/365 day calculations.
You can easily extrapolate this to create units of time for months, years, etc.