Steve Jobs died early due to his belief in "alternative" medicine

[SamIam]

I don't blame Jobs for turning to alternative medicine. Mainstream treatments have almost nothing to offer pancreatic cancer sufferers. Here's what one pancreatic cancer site has to say.

Survival Rates
According to the American Cancer Society, for all stages of pancreatic cancer combined, the one-year relative survival rate is 20%, and the five-year rate is 4%. These low survival rates are attributable to the fact that fewer than 20% of patients' tumors are confined to the pancreas at the time of diagnosis; in most cases, the malignancy has already progressed to the point where surgical removal is impossible

Progression
In patients where a cure is not possible, progression of the disease may be accompanied by progressive weakness, weight loss, and pain.

Wikipedia says the same thing, BTW - just with more scientific jargon.

So, if I were old Steve, I'd let modern medicine give it a shot, but if the treatment wasn't working (which it probably wasn't), why not experiment with alternative medicine?

I for one would not want to be kept alive for months, wracked with pain and getting weaker everyday and waiting for my inevitable death.

Yeah, maybe he died a little sooner, but he also had to endure less protracted suffering.

[glatt]

Well, if you read the link in the original post, he supposedly had a special kind of pancreatic cancer that was much more benign and survivable than most pancreatic cancers, but only with treatment that he didn't seek.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by glatt

Well, if you read the link in the original post, he supposedly had a special kind of pancreatic cancer that was much more benign and survivable than most pancreatic cancers, but only with treatment that he didn't seek.

It was a choice he made. He was a pretty smart guy. Many people seek to have no treatment. That is also a choice. We have to respect that.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by SamIam

I don't blame Jobs for turning to alternative medicine. Mainstream treatments have almost nothing to offer pancreatic cancer sufferers. Here's what one pancreatic cancer site has to say.



Wikipedia says the same thing, BTW - just with more scientific jargon.

So, if I were old Steve, I'd let modern medicine give it a shot, but if the treatment wasn't working (which it probably wasn't), why not experiment with alternative medicine?

I for one would not want to be kept alive for months, wracked with pain and getting weaker everyday and waiting for my inevitable death.

Yeah, maybe he died a little sooner, but he also had to endure less protracted suffering.

Unless I've misread the article, he did the opposite. He went straight for the alternative therapies and only went for mainstream treatment afterwards, by which time it had progresed beyond the easily treated cancer that they were talking about.


There is a real problem with people turning to faith healers and/or unproven (even unprovable in some cases) alternative therapies as a first step.

It's understandable. Cancer and its treatment are scary shit. Mainstream medicine doesn't always work, is often arduous, painful and upsetting, and every one of us most likely has a horror story in mind of a relative or friend who went all through the nightmare to no avail.

All blame in this area should be reserved for the charlatans who offer hope and dangle a cure when in fact they're not providing anything of the sort.

Personally I think the phrase 'alternative medicine' should be taken out of the language, put up against a wall and shot 10 times. 'Unproven medicine' is more accurate. As Tim Minchin says: y'know what they call alternative medicine that's been proven to work? Medicine.

[SamIam]

Thanks, Dana. I did indeed skip right over the article and hadn't read it before I made my post. This thread makes much more sense now.