[lbo-talk] Jobs in heaven

Andy andy274 at gmail.com
Mon Oct 17 11:16:25 PDT 2011



> This story that is floating around about Steve Jobs is also amusing.  One
> has to be cautious with MDs diagnosing patients they never met from 3000
> miles away, but it would be fitting if if Jobs' legendary control freak
> persona eventually did for him:
>
> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049019/Steve-Jobs-dead-Apple-CEO-shunned-conventional-cancer-medicine.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

There's some push and pull about the "Woo killed Jobs" narrative.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-death-of-steve-jobs/

The conclusion:

If there’s one thing we’re learning increasingly about cancer, it’s that biology is king and queen, and that our ability to fight biology is depressingly limited. In retrospect, we can now tell that Jobs clearly had a tumor that was unusually aggressive for an insulinoma. Such tumors are usually pretty indolent and progress only slowly. Indeed, I’ve seen patients and known a friend of a friend who survived many years with metastatic neuroendocrine tumors with reasonable quality of life. Jobs was unfortunate in that he appears to have had an unusually aggressive form of the disease that might well have ultimately killed him no matter what. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t take into account his delay in treatment and wonder if it contributed to his ultimate demise. It very well might have, the key word being “might.” We don’t know that it did, which is one reason why we have to be very, very careful not to overstate the case and attribute his death as being definitely due to the delay in therapy due to his wanting to “go alternative.” Finally, Jobs’ case illustrates the difficulties with applying SBM to rare diseases. When a disease is as uncommon as insulinomas are, it’s very difficult for practitioners to know what the best course of action is, and that uncertainty can make for decisions that are seemingly bizarre or inexplicable but that, if you have all the information, are supportable based on what we currently know.

-- Andy



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