Steve Jobs Succombed To Alternative Medicine
This makes me want to cry. Says Brian Dunning, Steve Jobs
...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 it’s 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.
Comments
ext_197133 on Oct. 7, 2011 1:10 AM
The paragraph that you quote is deceiving; makes it seem as though he only survived 9 months after diagnosis rather than the many years - just shy of a decade - that he did.
ext_24974 on Oct. 7, 2011 2:00 AM
I think the paragraph is clear. The way I read it, in the 1st 9 months after diagnosis he used diet/homeopathy instead of more effective treatments, and thereby reduced his survival down to only almost a decade, rather than the much longer than a decade that he could have had. The clickthrough link reads that way, too.
ext_21159 on Oct. 7, 2011 2:33 AM
Correct. He was diagnosed seven or eight years ago, and had ineffectual alternative remedies for nine months. The result was that he had to have most of his pancreas removed (as well as the gallbladder, part of the stomach, the lower half of the bile duct, and part of the small intestine). If, seven or eight years ago, he had received real medical treatment sooner, he would have kept most of his organs, and lived longer.
ext_197133 on Oct. 7, 2011 9:45 PM
I understand that, and I'd known much of that before his death. My first reading of the paragraph you quoted, though, made me say "Huh? No ... he's been ill much longer than 9 months ..."
ext_210685 on Oct. 7, 2011 1:55 PM — The Skeptic Blog Article
According to the following more even-handed article, it's likely that Brian Dunning pushed the facts farther than warranted to prove a point. While it's possible that the 9 months of alternative medicine is the reason he died so young; it's far from a foregone conclusion when some of the facts even contradict it. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/10/steve_jobs_neuroendocrine_tumors_and_alt.php?utm_source=networkbanner&utm_medium=link
ext_21159 on Oct. 7, 2011 9:43 PM — Re: The Skeptic Blog Article
That's a good article. Thanks for linking to it.
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