
After Steve Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2003, he allegedly delayed surgery to remove the tumor — the recommended treatment — for nine months. During that interim period, he attempted to treat his cancer with alternative medicine, including a special diet, according to news reports.
Did Steve Jobs get good cancer treatment?
· After Steve Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2003, he allegedly delayed surgery to remove the tumor — the recommended treatment — for nine months. During that interim...
How long did Steve Jobs live with pancreatic cancer?
· According to Steve Jobs ’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, the Apple mastermind eventually came to regret the decision he had made years earlier to reject potentially life-saving surgery in favor of...
Why did Steve Jobs lose his job at Apple?
· Andrew Weil says he can't say if Steve Job's treatment choices shortened his life He says in his studies he has found no alternative therapy for …
What did Steve Jobs think about his cancer?
· One, called Sutent, from Pfizer, was previously approved for the treatment of kidney cancer; it is an angiogenesis inhibitor, targeting the blood vessels that tumors require for …
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Chemotherapy and radiotherapy may be the best treatments we have in those cases, but they are crude approaches that damage normal cells as well as malignant ones, especially in sensitive tissues of the immune system. I’m sure they will eventually be replaced by targeted, individualized therapies that cause less collateral damage.

What was Steve Jobs alternative medicine?
When Mr. Jobs was first diagnosed in 2003, he chose to pursue alternative therapies, including acupuncture, herbal, diet and fruit juice therapy and spiritual consultations. Many of these therapies he found on the Internet.
What did Steve Jobs do when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer?
After a delay of nine months after diagnosis, in 2004, Jobs opted for surgery. He died 7 years later.
How treatable was Steve Jobs cancer?
After Steve Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2003, he allegedly delayed surgery to remove the tumor — the recommended treatment — for nine months.
Did Steve Jobs Decline cancer treatment?
Oct. 20, 2011 -- Steve Jobs, the visionary Apple co-founder who died earlier this month at 56, admitted to biographer Walter Isaacson that for nine months he refused to undergo surgery for his pancreatic cancer -- a decision he later regretted as his health declined.
How long can you live after Whipple procedure?
Overall, the five-year survival rate after a Whipple procedure is about 20 to 25%. Even if the procedure successfully removes the visible tumor, it's possible that some cancer cells have already spread elsewhere in the body, where they can form new tumors and eventually cause death.
Is pancreatic cancer curable?
Potentially Curable If Caught Very Early Despite the overall poor prognosis and the fact that the disease is mostly incurable, pancreatic cancer has the potential to be curable if caught very early. Up to 10 percent of patients who receive an early diagnosis become disease-free after treatment.
How long can you live with a neuroendocrine tumor?
Around 90 out of 100 people (around 90%) survive for 1 year or more. Around 89 out of every 100 people (around 89%) people survive for 5 years or more. This 5 year survival rate was taken from a European study that looked at 270 people diagnosed with a gut neuroendocrine tumour between 1984 and 2008.
How did Steve Jobs fight cancer?
He went for an experimental treatment in Switzerland in 2009, which involves using a radioactive isotope to attack the faulty hormone-producing cells of the body. These treatments may well have extended his life, but nine months is a long time to wait in cancer time.
Can stress cause neuroendocrine tumors?
The neuroendocrine mechanisms of chronic stress. Chronic stress produces stress hormones during the activation of the neuroendocrine system (hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis) and the sympathetic nervous system, which can promote tumor development and regulate the tumor microenvironment.
What is the Whipple procedure used for?
The Whipple procedure (also called a pancreaticoduodenectomy) is the primary surgical treatment for pancreatic cancer that occurs within the head of the gland.
Did Steve Jobs have the Whipple procedure?
Jobs finally took medical leave and underwent surgery at Stanford University Medical Center, as physicians performed a modified "Whipple procedure" that removed part of his pancreas.
Can neuroendocrine tumors come back?
The chance that neuroendocrine cancer will come back (recur) is greatest within 5 years, so close follow-up is needed during this time.
Did Steve Jobs diet cause pancreatic cancer?
'” (Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, but eating excessive amounts of fruit does not cause pancreatic cancer.)
Could Steve Jobs have been saved?
In his “60 Minutes” interview, Isaacson confirmed details that had been speculated upon or widely reported, including that Jobs might have been cured of his “slow-growing” cancer had he sought professional treatment sooner, rather than resorting to unconventional means.
Why was an endoscopy done on Steve Jobs?
Jobs is said to have undergone the Whipple procedure. This is the preferred type of surgery when an islet cell tumor is on the head of the pancreas.
How long did Steve Jobs live after his transplant?
Jobs, who suffered from a rare type of pancreatic cancer, went on to receive a liver transplant in 2009. He took a six-month medical leave of absence that year, and another period in mid-January 2011 before stepping down as chief executive in August. He died in October 2011 aged 56.
Did Steve Jobs have cancer?
Though he ultimately embraced the surgery and sought out cutting-edge experimental methods, they were not enough to save him. Jobs’ cancer had been discovered by chance during a CT scan in 2003 to look for kidney stones, during which doctors saw a "shadow” on his pancreas.
Did Steve Jobs have a liver transplant?
He had an under-the-radar liver transplant and began putting a lot of energy into researching the most sophisticated experimental methods, making a complete about-face from how he began his treatment years before. According to the New York Times, Jobs was one of the few people in the world to have his genome sequenced.
Where did Steve Jobs study Buddhism?
Jobs had spent time studying Buddhism in India, and he felt it served him in his work. “The main thing I've learned is intuition, that the people in India are not just pure rational thinkers, that the great spiritual ones also have an intuition.”.
Did Steve Jobs have cancer?
Steve Jobs had a long run with a rare form of cancer (a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor) that is sometimes curable by early surgery. While I was not his physician and don’t have access to the details of his illness or its treatment, assertions that his use of alternative medicine shortened his life strike me as uninformed. No one knows how long he would have survived or what his quality of life would have been had he opted for immediate surgery and used only conventional treatment.
Who is Andrew Weil?
Editor’s Note: Andrew Weil is the director of the of the integrative medicine program at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, and Professor of Medicine and Public Health, author of 8 Weeks to Optimum Health, Healthy Aging, and the forthcoming Spontaneous Happiness. He co-edited, with Donald Abrams, MD, a textbook of Integrative Oncology published by Oxford University Press.
What is Steve Jobs' cancer?
Jobs learned in 2003 that he had an extremely rare form of this cancer, an islet-cell neuroendocrine tumor. As the name implies, it arises from islet cells, the specialized factories within the pancreas that produce and secrete insulin, which cells need in order to take in glucose from the food we eat.
Did Steve Jobs have pancreatic cancer?
Steve Jobs was right to be optimistic when, in 2004, he announced that he had cancer in his pancreas. Although cancer of the pancreas has a terrible prognosis—half of all patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer die within 10 months of the diagnosis; half of those in whom it has metastasized die within six months—cancer in ...
What is the purpose of sutent?
Specifically, it targets a molecule called VEGF that sends signals that promote the growth of blood vessels .
What is the target of angiogenesis inhibitors?
Specifically, it targets a molecule called VEGF that sends signals that promote the growth of blood vessels. “Neuroendocrine tumors are highly vascularized”—full of blood vessels on which they depend for nutrients, says Kulke. “So angiogenesis inhibitors might be a very good start.”.
Is surgery curative for cancer?
That’s not good enough. If cancer is confined to one part of the body and is accessible, surgery usually is curative, and it would be foolish not to use it. Unfortunately, by the time many cancers are detected, they already have spread.
What is the best treatment for cancer?
All cancer patients there get appropriate surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy as well as sophisticated herbal therapy designed to reduce toxicity and increase the efficacy of those treatments, strengthen the body’s defenses against cancer, and enhance quality of life.
What kind of cancer did Steve Jobs have?
Jobs had a rare form of pancreatic cancer known as pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (pNET).
Who is Jessica Wapner?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (S) Jessica Wapner is a science writer and author of The Philadelphia Chromosome: A Genetic Mystery, a Lethal Cancer, and the Improbable Invention of a Lifesaving Treatment (The Experiment, 2014). Credit: Nick Higgins.
How long do you live with pancreatic cancer?
For patients in whom this cancer has spread outside the pancreas, the median survival is 27 months.
Does acupuncture help with tumors?
But although it may have contributed to overall well-being, acupuncture is unlikely to have had an impact on the tumor itself. "It is not enough to change the course of the disease," says Lowell Kobrin, a medical doctor who now focuses on acupuncture and herbal medicine at Northbend Medical Center in Coos Bay, Ore.
How does Chinese medicine work?
Some clinical studies have confirmed the efficacy of this traditional Chinese medicine approach, in which needles are shallowly inserted at different points on the body, in diminishing the nausea, pain and fatigue that often follow chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, the mainstays of modern cancer treatment .
