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The world lost a true visionary yesterday with the passing of Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple. I remember back in the late 80’s when I was a young computer programmer/designer fresh out of grad school using the (Apple) MacIntosh computer for the very first time.
The MacIntosh user interface was so intuitive and such a leap ahead of the predominant Microsoft DOS operating system (remember? type commands at the green screen prompt) that I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
This new and emerging user interface in the 1980s that is taken for granted today rocketed the task of computer design light years ahead and allowed the development of computer systems to at last be something users could be involved in and easily understand.
There is no doubt that Steve Jobs’ passing at 56 years old was premature. He had much more to contribute to the world and I for one feel the world has been cheated now that he is gone.
Pictures of him in his final days showed a frail, shockingly thin frame consistent with a person who had undergone chemotherapy treatments for cancer.
While every single detail of Mr. Jobs’ cancer treatments over the years are not publicly known, one can’t help but wonder if his chemotherapy and radiation treatments contributed to his demise.
Just a few weeks ago, Kara Kennedy, daughter of the late Senator Edward Kennedy died at age 51 from a heart attack. Her brother, Patrick Kennedy said that her many years of chemotherapy to treat lung cancer took a severe toll on her health and weakened her physically to the point where “her heart just gave out.”
Is Conventional Treatment for Cancer Worse Than the Disease?
It seems that chemotherapy/radiation treatments causing death rather than preserving life are becoming more common.
Radiation in particular ups the risk of heart problems in women undergoing conventional treatment for breast cancer. The May 2000 issue of The Lancet reported that women who had undergone radiation for breast cancer increased their odds of dying from other causes, usually heart related, by 21% compared with women who had not undergone radiation with the 20 year survival rate for breast cancer improving by only 1%.
Does that seem worth it to you? It sure doesn’t to me.
Chemotherapy is another conventional treatment for cancer that seems to hasten people’s death. The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death in the UK reported that its review of 600 cancer patients who died within 30 days of treatment revealed that over one quarter had in fact been killed by the chemo and not cancer.
The extreme toxicity of chemo treatments is what causes the rapid demise, usually infections such as the very serious neutropenic sepsis.
In the case of Mr. Jobs, this appears to be what happened. According to reports from multiple sources, he had received chemotherapy treatments in recent months at the Stanford Cancer Center in Palo Alto California and his devastating physical deterioration from these treatments almost certainly contributed to his quick passing.
Would You Ever Use Chemo or Radiation to Treat Cancer?
If you received a cancer diagnosis, would you ever agree to chemotherapy or radiation treatments or would you explore nontoxic alternative therapies?
I, for one, would not consider conventional cancer treatment as such an approach to disease seems more than a little misguided. How can use of toxic chemicals and/or radiation possibly be beneficial when both of these treatments actually have been shown to cause cancer in the long run?
It seems that a more holistic approach to cancer would be wiser than the slash and burn approach of conventional cancer treatments.
In his article A Holistic Approach To Cancer, Dr. Tom Cowan MD writes:
“… the job of the doctor is to distinguish between the therapy and the illness. What I mean by that is if you get a splinter in your finger, and then your body makes pus to get the splinter out, is the pus the therapy or the disease? We know that pus indicates infection and the presence of microorganisms, and we learned in medical school that doctors should kill the pus. But I don’t think it is that far of a stretch to see that if you have a splinter in your finger, the pus is the therapy for the splinter. If you don’t take the splinter out, the pus will do it for you. If you mistakenly think that the pus is the disease and you destroy the pus, the splinter will stay and your body will attempt this process again. If you destroy the pus again, your body might repeat this process three or four more times. Then you have a chronic infection as the body keeps trying to remove the splinter. Eventually it will either succeed, or it will encapsulate the splinter, which is a tumor, a new growth. It is not a cancerous tumor but a benign cystic tumor of the splinter. The understanding that the pus is the therapy allows you to predict what is going to happen in the future.
Now think of this example. Joe Bloke is a smoker. In other words, he puts a bunch of splinters in his lungs every day. Twice a year Joe gets cough, fever, mucus–all to get the splinters out of his lungs. I prefer to say “cough, fever, mucus” rather than “bronchitis” because the word “bronchitis” separates you from the reality of the situation. His body is producing an inflammatory response–it is making a mucus-pus-fever response to cleanse his lungs of splinters. If Joe goes to a doctor who makes the mistake of thinking that the response is the problem, he will give drugs to stop the bronchitis–which is actually the medicine. So Joe will be left with the splinters. That scenario will happen twice a year for thirty years and then Joe has a big bag of splinters in his lungs, and we call that lung cancer.”
Holistic approaches to cancer help resolve whatever caused the cancer in the first place. Conventional chemo/radiation treat only the “pus” of the cancer as described by Dr. Cowan.
Stopping cancer symptoms by “killing” the cancer cells with chemo or radiation is not in any way a cure as Mr. Jobs tragically discovered in his long running quest to regain his health.
Sarah, TheHealthyHomeEconomist.com
Source: Doctors Rely on Chemo Too Much
definitely NOt judging you mikkie, it’s a personal decision for sure <3
Speaking as someone who has fought brain cancer first hand (with her husband) ..let me say this.. IT DEPENDS. It is really, really easy to say you would never do something, until you have a team of medical experts around you pushing chemo or death? He choose not to have any form of medical treatment in the way of chemo/radiation. My husband was given three months (at most) and has been alive going on eight years now perfectly healthy. We believe that in God and have a very strong faith in this area. We eat a very healthy diet but my husband is truly a walking miracle the medical community claims. We have offers to have studies done on him, be in medical journals ect. but we know and understand truly who is keeping him alive. I have seen people who if they could have gone at the chemo full on at first it would have saved their life. The option my husband was given for chemo would have only prolonged his life a few months they claimed. It wasn’t worth it to us and we opted to go by faith. It has taken everything we have had to stand up to the medical community about NOT DOING conventional medical treatment. Plus, my husband was a minor when he first began and there were legal problems that my-laws ran into. My husband’s family got turned into social services, it was ugly and horrible… so on top of fighting cancer, if your a minor you have to fight the system- not something most parents can afford or do emotionally. I think it is easier to say no when they claim your terminal. You know that its only God who will keep you here and it frees you from doing anything you can to save yourself. You just accept it and rejoice everyday that your still here.
Oh on a side note: When we went into the hospital last year (first time in seven years) because my husband’s shut (drains the fluid from his brain) had randomly stopped working. They asked what kind of treatment we had done, if any, in the last few years. We told them what the doctors had pushed at us years ago, what we had refused, and they looked horrified! They told us that if we had done what they had told us to do, literally, it would have fired his brain. They just didn’t know that at the time because not enough research had been done that this was a side effect. They told us the only reason that my husband was still here was because we hadn’t gone though with the treatment they suggested. I guess no matter what a doctor thinks, he is still a man and you have to do what you feel peace about doing!
I was 40. Kidds were 3 and 6. Same scenario (only mine had spread to 5 nodes). I was not willing to risk it with food as my medicine. The success rate with chemo and radiationfor breast cancer are too good…. Despite the chances of long term side effects. I did my research and certainly don’t feel misguided by my decision. Untill your facing death with babies and a husband at home counting on you to be a survivor….i challenge you to withhold judgment of those of us who had to make a very difficult decision .
“i challenge you to withhold judgment of those of us who had to make a very difficult decision .”
Yes, you hit it right. When you are faced with this decision for yourself, your loved ones, your children, it IS an agonizingly difficult decision and not one that someone else can speak against, since they are not in your shoes.
I’m all for people providing FACTS about what available options there are out there so someone making this decision can have as much info as possible, but posts that go past that end up harming, not helping.
After witnessing the ravaging effects of chemo and radiation on my grandfather and others, I will NEVER do it. The survival rates are so dismal that they hesitate to publish them.
There are other options that are very effective including the Rife light and dietary changes to kill the cancer and dissolve the tumors. I personally know several people who have done it to the amazement of their MD’s when the PET scans come back clean.
I still can’t figure out why I’m getting these newsletters a day later than everyone else. It doesn’t make sense. I have signed up for the RSS feed, but it’s the same thing. Already there are over 65 comments here and I just this minute received and opened the thing. Would anyone know if this is an ISP issue? A Yahoo! issue (since I use Yahoo! email)? Arrgh.
As to Steve Jobs, he was a visionary. If he started out using nutrition and holistic methods and he let someone talk him out of that method, he wasn’t a visionary in anything except electronics. Michael Douglas is going to go this same way in a few short months, I predict. Patrick Swazey and a few others already have. You’d think Jobs would have been able to see the writing on the wall, but many do not when blinded with bogus science. Go to the TED video web site and look up Ben Goldacre’s 13 minute video on Bad Science. It’s an eye-opener and if it were on YouTube it would have been taken down already. For sure.
Hi D., it has to do with your email provider. Some deliver the newsletters more quickly than others.
Thanks, Sarah. I was afraid this was the case. In truth, they’re probably mostly the same. I used to have gmail but dropped that because sometimes I didn’t get things for DAYS. Only one I haven’t tried is hotmail – mostly because I can’t stand that name! It always reminds me of my parents talking about someone being hot to trot – it was not a good thing, which I knew instinctively even as a 7-8 y/o! It’s a dumb reason, I know, but there it is.
Guess I’ll just have to be a day late and a dollar short.
Wow, this one really hit me in a painful spot!! I lost my dad to prostate cancer 12 years ago, and I am STILL learning from what we went through with him. He went ahead and did what the Dr. ordered, but my mom talked him into some alternative meds/therapies; this helped so much that the doctor at M.D. Anderson was amazed that his x-ray showed the disintegration of his cancer from a one month grape/and grape juice fast! NO TRACE! Well, they appreciated what they saw, but then his PSA was still high, so they decided to give him another round of CASADEX, just to make sure. BAD DECISION… he began to sicken and we watched him die not too long after that, and now we know that the PSA is not a true reflector of the situation and sometimes it is totally IGNORED! I have finally come to accept that God is in charge, and every person does have to choose for themselves. (I have worked in healthcare for 28 years, so I didn’t come to this totally ignorant of what is being offered as options.) NO ONE offers alternative first in traditional medicine. Period. So, we MUST be our own advocates and we can’t make an educated decision unless we are ALLOWED to THINK for ourselves. I get fighting mad when I see some of my patients not even being told about the true side effects of their “medicines” and then we have to try to “fix” what those drugs have done. (You can’t say that out loud; it is not acceptable.) I have tried very subtilly to just tell them to do their own research and you know what they tell me?? Well, my doctor told me otherwise.. Now, THAT is the issue! Thank you Sarah, for just getting the dialogue going. I fully believe that millions of people are dying for lack of knowledge. (that quote is in the Bible) I am so sad about Mr. Jobs, because I agree that he probably died too soon and maybe he was never offered another option? I don’t know; I only know my experience and that I have seen daily for 28 years. God bless. Oh, I want to tell Ami the physician that I can’t tell her how much I appreciate just knowing that there ARE some doctors out there who CAN think outside the box!!! HURRAY! God bless you especially as you will have to battle the Big Pharma and hospital administration. Stick to your beliefs! At the end of the day, you will be so glad you did! (:
i’ve watched too many people die from the chemo and not the cancer, so my choice would NOT be chemo. jmho
Since none of us knows any details about Steve Jobs’ personal medical history, it’s pointless to speculate about what made him sick or sicker. I did learn on the news last night as they were talking about his life that he tried many alternative therapies (before he had his liver transplant) and they simply were not healing him. His family begged him to consider conventional treatment. Perhaps when faced with our own mortality we just want to live a few more months or years. Do not judge anyone for their choices, especially when you don’t know the details of those choices or of their condition.
Speaking of choices…
I think it’s the erosion of our ability, our right, to even make those choices that is the most worrisome development in recent years (see my post above).
Exactly. Each person and situation are unique. We cannot and should not make a blanket generalization about the situation, especially if we, ourselves, are not in the same position.
I’m a breast cancer survivor and I did do the chemo. Did I do more harm than good??? I don’t know. All I know is that I was 38 years old and had just had my third baby. My children were 5, 3 and 3 months when I had my mastectomy. The thought of leaving my children was almost more than I could bear. My cancer had not spread to my nodes, so that’s great. I was told I had a 75% survival with just the mastectomy and a 98% with the chemo. I was never sick, but I did lose my hair and one of the drugs gave me terrible large bone and muscle pain. Of course, that was six years ago and I didn’t now then what I know now. If it came back…..God forbid….I don’t know what sort of treatment I would pursue. My kids are now 11, 9 and 6. So far so good….I’ve been cancer-free for six years. Yea me!! I simply refuse to leave my babies before they are raised.
My husband had cancer at the age of 31. Chemo eradicated it in less than 6 months and now he is healthier than he has been in years. I think saying never to chemo is a mistake. I would say, study your options. It was our only option against a rapidly growing tumor, which shrunk after the first treatment.
On the flip side of the coin my husband’s Great-Grandmother recently died from lung cancer, and chemo did her more harm than good. I think you have to consider age and overall health before making a decision one way or the other.
Glad you are still here for your children.
While I doubt I’d ever use chemo, if I were in that situation, I’d study all the info very carefully before I made a final decision, as anyone should.
My aquaintance of chemo is from volunteer work on an oncology ward. Patients would be hospitalized for a week of intensive chemo, home 2 weeks – repeating this about 5 times. I never saw lab results, but I did see people who looked strong and healthy turn into thin, weak, and sick-looking people. All this would be worth it if it gave them years of life afterwards, but after volunteering there for about 2 years, I realized NOT ONE lived to see those years. I never said a word to anyone (it wasn’t my place) but I felt like telling them to literally run for their lives.
A very telling and astute observation Ruth. Most people in your position would not have noticed what you noticed. They would have been so emotionally bought into what they were doing for a living that it would have blinded them to the truth.