Sunday, October 9, 2011

Steve Jobs: Speculation on his cancer death

Many have linked to Steve Jobs' commencement address at Stanford.

If you haven't heard it yet, do yourself a huge favor and listen. It is profound and wonderful and prescient.

His third "story" rings with a deep resonance that has rattled my walls and even broken a few windows in the fortress I had constructed to weather my cancer storm over the last six years.

He said:

"Your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life."

He quoted:

"Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

Listen again to it all:


Fewer will have discovered this following link.

It is a balanced and very detailed medical discussion of Steve Jobs' alternative and conventional cancer treatments. Although still somewhat speculative on key points, it is non the less illustrative of the tricky path we all must take when faced with a medical crisis where there is no clear roadmap to a cure.

It is helpful to see how such a visionary deals and ultimately loses his battle with a personal health crisis.


56 years old is way too young to die. I was diagnosed at 54 and I know that fact personally.

Thank you, Steve Jobs for all you have brought in your too short life to my life and the lives of so many.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Your link to see the balanced view of Job's treatments doesn't appear on my computer. I wonder why not.

Scott

October 20, 2011 at 4:47 PM  
Blogger Brian Koffman said...

Scott,
Not sure why that is? I tried and it worked for me. Did you cut and paste the address into your browser?
I understand that his recent bio deals with this issue in greater detail
I have pasted the the last paragraph from the link below for you. The preceding details are important so see if you can navigate there.
Brian

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 probably would have 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." It's also important to remember that, as much of a brilliant visionary Jobs was, even brilliant visionaries can make bad decisions when it comes to health.

October 25, 2011 at 2:26 PM  

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