Biographer: Steve Jobs refused early and potentially life-saving surgery

[NFS4]

DOH!

Apple CEO Steve Jobs refused to allow surgeons to perform what could have been life-saving surgery on his pancreatic cancer, says his biographer Walter Isaacson. In one of his deepest discussions with him, Isaacson says Jobs told him he regretted his decision to try alternative therapies and said he put off the operation because it was too invasive.
Isaacson reveals these and many other inner thoughts of the man who entrusted him with the writing of his life story in the upcoming book, "Steve Jobs." The author talks to Steve Kroft in his first interview about Jobs, the late technology visionary whose innovative products like the Macintosh, iPhone and iPad changed the world. The interview will be broadcast on "60 Minutes," Sunday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

"I've asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,'" Isaacson recalls. So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson. Asked by Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision, Isaacson replies, "I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking...we talked about this a lot," he tells Kroft. "He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."

He finally had the surgery and told his employees about it, but played down the seriousness of his condition. Isaacson says he was receiving cancer treatments in secret even though he was telling everyone he was cured.

Isaacson conducted over 40 interviews with Jobs, some of them taped right before his death. The story Sunday will contain Jobs' own recorded words about some of the most important times of his life.

Isaacson reveals several of the best stories from the biography, including the fact that Jobs had actually met the man who turned out to be his biological father before he knew who he was. He also talks about the discussion he had with Jobs about death and the afterlife, explaining that for Jobs, the odds of there being a God were 50-50, but that he thought about the existence of God much more once he was diagnosed with cancer. Another aspect of Jobs' character revealed was his disdain for conspicuous consumption. He tells Isaacson in a taped conversation how he saw Apple staffers turn into "bizarro people" by the riches the Apple stock offering created. Isaacson says Jobs vowed never to let his wealth change him.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/20/60minutes/main20123269.shtml


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZS8HqOGTbA

 

[Number1]

I hope this get's well publicized and hopefully open some people eyes to the dangers of non traditional medicine.

 

[dank69]

I hope this get's well publicized and hopefully open some people eyes to the dangers of non traditional medicine.

This. :thumbsup:

 

[PieIsAwesome]

I hope this get's well publicized and hopefully open some people eyes to the dangers of non traditional fake medicine.

Fixed.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

Looks like he wasn't smart enough to realize alternative medicine that works is just called medicine. Although I'll give him the benefit of a doubt and assume knowing his life was on the line made him irrational

 

[Wreckem]

Everyone keeps saying this, but the facts are even with surgery the overwhelming majority of pancreatic cancer patients die with in 12 months. Less than 5% live 5 years. 20 years is almost nil. His 8 years is still an outlier. Thats all with treatment and surgery. He might have lived a few years longer but it probably wouldn't have saved his life long term.

 

[Texashiker]

I hope this get's well publicized and hopefully open some people eyes to the dangers of non traditional medicine.

Modern medicine is non-traditional medicine.

Traditional medicine existed for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years before modern medicine.

 

[dank69]

Everyone keeps saying this, but the facts are even with surgery the overwhelming majority of pancreatic cancer patients die with in 12 months. Less than 5% live 5 years. 20 years is almost nil. Thats all with treatment and surgery. He might have lived a few years longer but it probably wouldn't have saved his life long term.

Doesn't this depend on how early it is detected?

 

[dank69]

Modern medicine is non-traditional medicine.

Traditional medicine existed for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years before modern medicine.

Oh look who decide to pop in and be deliberately obtuse.

 

[Texashiker]

Oh look who decide to pop in and be deliberately obtuse.

I had a friend die of pancreatic cancer. He had been complaining of feeling bad for probably a month, he finally took a day off work to go to the doctor, he was buried 21 days later.

As for Steve, maybe he was in denial. I do not know what I would do until I have been in the same situation. But I see no reason to criticize the man for his choices.

 

[irishScott]

I hope this get's well publicized and hopefully open some people eyes to the dangers of non traditional medicine.

More like opens their eyes to the dangers of putting selfish, pointless dignity ahead of survival. There are plenty of "alternative" options that have legitimate medical backing (ie: St. John's Wort for depression), but the reason for trying them is to "scale up" so as to cause as little damage to the body as possible. With something like pancreatic cancer, things have already scaled up way beyond alternative therapies and you need the big guns. Denying yourself those resources to maintain some bullshit wannabe divinity that you've assigned to your body is pathetic.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

Modern medicine is non-traditional medicine.

Traditional medicine existed for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years before modern medicine.

Modern medicine is the traditional medicine that worked plus new discoveries. Most medicine over the past 1600 years has been a step backwards from Roman medicine we only caught back up with them about 80 years ago.

 

[Number1]

Everyone keeps saying this, but the facts are even with surgery the overwhelming majority of pancreatic cancer patients die with in 12 months. Less than 5% live 5 years. 20 years is almost nil. His 8 years is still an outlier. Thats all with treatment and surgery. He might have lived a few years longer but it probably wouldn't have saved his life long term.

There are different type of pancreatic cancers.
The type he had is easily treated if cut early. He just waited too long.

I guess thinking differently doesn't always work.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

That's the problem with cancer; often, you're facing a lose-lose scenario. On the one hand, invasive surgery which can't guarantee your survival for a significantly longer time than if you don't have the surgery, and on the other hand, death. Now, obviously "anything but death" seems like the best option, but what if he had the surgery and still died a year later? Would that be worth it to him? There's no guaranteed time of survival either way.

 

[Wreckem]

Doesn't this depend on how early it is detected?

Oh sorry. I forgot, if you catch pancreatic cancer early while it is small and hasn't moved beyond the pancreas i.e.: stage 1, your 5 year survival rate is a WHOPPING 25%. Thats better than 5% but hardly life saving. And again long term prognosis even if caught early is death. To compare to other cancers, Breast Cancer has a near 100% survival rate if caught at stage 1. Only extreme outliers ever beat pancreatic cancer.

This is why I am sick of the Komen/Breast Cancer Awareness month is shit. Breast cancer is easily detectable and HIGHLY treatable. Other forms of cancer not so much and they get squat for research nor do they have the huge "non-profits" and media backing.

 

[novasatori]

Everyone keeps saying this, but the facts are even with surgery the overwhelming majority of pancreatic cancer patients die with in 12 months. Less than 5% live 5 years. 20 years is almost nil. His 8 years is still an outlier. Thats all with treatment and surgery. He might have lived a few years longer but it probably wouldn't have saved his life long term.

Not for his particular type, there is a post by a guy who specialized in it on Quora.

Just to illustrate how mild these tumors can be:

• As many as 10% of autopsied persons in the general population have been reported to have one of these without ever having had any symptoms during their life.
• Up to 30% of detected GEP-NETs are so well differentiated they're strictly not cancers. I have even come across an article where insulinomas, the most common type of GEP-NETs were benign in 90% of the cases.
• If treated appropriately and in time, most people won't die from the cancer itself. In my series of patients, for many subtypes, the survival rate was as high as 100% over a decade.

See http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/Why-did-Steve-Jobs-choose-not-to-effectively-treat-his-cancer

 

[Wreckem]

Not for his particular type, there is a post by a guy who specialized in it on Quora.



See http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/Why-did-Steve-Jobs-choose-not-to-effectively-treat-his-cancer

No one but Steve Jobs, his family, and his Doctors knows what type of pancreatic cancer he had.

His biography says he only waited 9 months before getting surgery. If it was this and not pancreatic cancer, 9 months probably wouldn't have mattered(i.e.: it wouldn't have caused him to have major issues in 2005 and die in 2011), unless they really didn't catch it early.

 

[MisterJackson]

His body, his life, his choice. I'd never call him stupid for making a decision on what he felt was right, and I'm not a fan of Jobs at all. I think he was just well over-hyped. What I would do, had I been in his shoes, is been less of a selfish prick and thought more of my family first and the business secondly and got the fuckin surgery. He let his ego get in the way of his health and paid the price, but that doesn't mean he's stupid. Just egotistical.

 

[Ninjahedge]

Wreck, you need to factor in several things:

1. He had a cancer that kills in a month or two. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most virulent forms out there.

2. He still survived longer than most in similar straits. So whatever combination of traditional and alternative medicine he used may well have delayed the development of the cancer.

3. If it is caught early enough AND you are willing to drop millions on experimental procedures outside the US, you have a better chance of surviving than the "average" patient being paid for (and approved/disapproved) by US Healthcare.

He was a very self-involved controlling person. I think the idea of anybody mucking around inside him was such an anathema to him that he only allowed it when death was looking at him in the mirror.

By that time all it did was let him look in the mirror a bit longer.

If he only got the surgery FIRST, THEN went on alternative treatments, then maybe he would still be alive.

 

[gevorg]

It was a tough call on his side. No matter what you do, cancer has a high risk of death. Similar stories can be found where people declined modern medicine in favor of traditional/chinese medicine and survived. One day, chemotherapy will be viewed as the dark age of medicine.

EDIT: And of course there is plenty of pseudoscience scammers who feed on desperate people with the "natural" medicine cures.

 

[irishScott]

His body, his life, his choice. I'd never call him stupid for making a decision on what he felt was right, and I'm not a fan of Jobs at all. I think he was just well over-hyped. What I would do, had I been in his shoes, is been less of a selfish prick and thought more of my family first and the business secondly and got the fuckin surgery. He let his ego get in the way of his health and paid the price, but that doesn't mean he's stupid. Just egotistical.

If what he felt was right was stupid, then yes in that instance he was stupid. One could also argue that extreme egotism is a form of stupidity.

 

[torpid]

I think the problem here is that there wasn't much reason to refuse the surgery. Unlike, say, Grant Achatz, a world-famous chef who refused surgery because it would have required removing his tongue. Jobs would have had minimal career issues after recovery. The other disturbing thing is that Achatz got some bad medical advice for multiple years and had to actually be pushy and advocate on his own behalf to doctors, whereas Jobs seemed to be doing the opposite -- he was getting good advice and just refused it.

 

[lokiju]

I hope this get's well publicized and hopefully open some people eyes to the dangers of non traditional medicine.

This is exactly my thoughts when I read about this in the News Week special last week.

My Mom is completely that kind of person that would go to the vitamin store 1st thing if she found out something like this.

 

[NFS4]

It was a tough call on his side. No matter what you do, cancer has a high risk of death. Similar stories can be found where people declined modern medicine in favor of traditional/chinese medicine and survived. One day, chemotherapy will be viewed as the dark age of medicine.

EDIT: And of course there is plenty of pseudoscience scammers who feed on desperate people with the "natural" medicine cures.

He should have just smoked a bunch of weed to cure it 😉

 

[JS80]

Not quite clear cut Darwin, but close