Im sad that today Im adding a slide to one of my live presentations, adding Steve Jobs to the list of
famous people who died treating terminal diseases with woo rather than with medicine.
Seven or eight years ago, the news broke that Steve Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer,
but considering it a private matter, he delayed in informing Apples board, and Apples board delayed in informing the shareholders. So what. The only delay that really mattered was that Steve, it turned out, had been treating his pancreatic cancer with a special diet and other alternative therapies, prescribed by his naturopath.
Most pancreatic cancers are aggressive and always terminal, but Steve was lucky (if you can call it that) and had a rare form called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which is actually quite treatable with excellent survival rates if caught soon enough. The median survival is about a decade, but it depends on how soon its removed surgically.
Steve caught his very early, and should have expected to survive much longer than a decade. Unfortunately Steve relied on a naturopathic diet instead of early surgery. There is no evidence that diet has any effect on islet cell carcinoma.
As he dieted for nine months, the tumor progressed, and took him from the high end to the low end of the survival rate.
Eventually it became clear to all involved that his alternative therapy wasnt working, and from then on, by all accounts, Steve aggressively threw money at the best that medical science could offer. But it was too late. He had a
Whipple procedure. He had a liver transplant. And then he died, all too young. . . .
We cant say for sure that Steve would still be alive and making lives better were it not for the alternative therapy, but the statistics suggest it very strongly. If you insist on unproven therapies, fine; but also try the proven ones.
