For one, Woz is still alive.
One of his diets was a poorly designed "fruitarian" diet consisting of eating one kind of fruit for weeks, or drinking excessive amounts of fruit juice like Odwalla carrot juice... or sometimes, just fasting for long periods of time.
Very few people live like this, so there is not much medical literature about the implications of this lifestyle. I think this could have contributed to his health decline.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...
His absence is such a loss to the tech industry that this is hard to digest, even after a decade.
I was in hospital recently for acute necrotizing pancreatitis (not fun, it will be a long time healing, if ever—fingers crossed).
I have to stick to a low- to non- fat diet (~ 30g or less a day) and occasionally have to skip eating altogether for half a day to several days if I'm feeling discomfort or pain. In hospital I wasn't allowed to eat anything for days. Just some water or fruit juice and, thankfully, hydromorphone.
Trying diets isn't very surprising. Even pancreatitis seems to vary in what diet will work for people. It sounds like some have to avoid fibre, others need more fibre. Some can go back to eating fats without straining the pancreas and some can't go near any. It's awful, especially because of how unpredictable and difficult the pancreas can be. It's not totally out-there to just try things related to diet as a last ditch attempt, if you ask me—but it's also not based on clinically-proven science either. (Except for fats and alcohol in the case of pancreatitis). Further, there is a dearth of layman information and community for pancreatic illnesses which can be disheartening and probably inspire just trying anything.
But during my experience everything I've heard about pancreatic cancer is that it's essentially a death sentence—and a horrible one. (Cursory look at the US National Cancer Institute—relative survival rate after 5 years is about 10%)
Pancreatic cancer is curable if it’s caught soon enough. (And I seem to recall that Jobs’ disease was thought to be atypical in some positive way, although details were obviously limited.) The problem is that due to the anatomy of the region, the disease is often advanced before symptoms are noticed, or noticed and thoroughly investigated.
Much of the information out there is either garbage or medical research papers. Most information on any pancreatic illness involves diet/digestion and potential surgery.
This stuff has been on my radar because unfortunately severe cases of pancreatitis can precede chronic conditions[0], cysts, tumours, and potentially even pancreatic cancer.
Jobs seems to have had a liver transplant. That says a couple of things. If the cancer had spread to his liver his chances were not good. His cancer was of the islet cells. Islet cells are the part of the pancreas that regulate blood sugar levels. So immediately he was staring down diabetes with surgery and removal of a large portion of them. There are surgeries (we've looked at them as possible futures) to transplant islet cells to the liver in order to try and avoid becoming diabetic if part or all of the pancreas has to be removed.
So this is a completely uneducated guess and only speculation, but if he was looking into islet cell transplants[1] prior to pancreatic head removal then he may have wanted a healthy liver first. Information relating to those details hasn't been made public to my knowledge. Most of the information surrounding his health seems as if it was measured in its releases. Also that he had a Whipple procedure it sounds like he was also having more traditional treatments.[2] Diet is also a part of treatment and symptom management and, from personal experience, the diet is pretty well the same as that for pancreatitis.[3]
Being that he lived 7 years after what is publicly known to be his diagnosis, he beat the average by a couple of years. That puts him in the 90th percentile of all pancreatic cancer deaths (at least according to the present figures I mentioned before which don't differentiate between types of pancreatic cancer).
[0] https://pancreasfoundation.org/patient-information/pancreati...
[1] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/overvi...
[2] https://pancreasfoundation.org/patient-information/pancreati...
You’re right he beat the odds, time-wise... but this is what being a billionaire with a team of world-class oncologists at your beck and call will do for you. He had full genome sequencing of his tumour before it was widely accessible, and it’s reasonable to assume that based on the results of this, his team will have tried a variety of atypical and possibly experimental treatments.
https://osher.ucsf.edu/patient-care/integrative-medicine-res...
“Death is very likely the single best invention of life”
Steve said that. You don’t have to agree. But you can’t deny that these people who might not have lived very long have changed things: Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Steve Jobs. To definitively declare that you must live long to live a fulfilling life is insulting to those who haven’t the opportunity.
- Byron, The Corsair
How many of those could I do starting at 60? There are lots of life choices it’s easy to make at 25 that are not easy to make 65.
Even something as simple as 3 month cross country road trip. My parents retired at 55 and did that twice. My parents are still independent, but with their eyesight and hearing going they couldn’t decide at 75 to hop in their car and spend three months on the road.
I donate to Lifespan.io in the hope of this.
I lost a large part of my net worth between those two things - but I had the income to both enjoy life and to recover.
Everything I mentioned above happened between the time I was 25-35. Some good, some bad but I don’t regret any of it.
I wouldn’t take nearly the risks in my 60s that I did in my 30s. If I broke a bone in my 20s while doing some of the crazy stuff I did, I could heel. Not so much in my 60s.
I got a chance to start over with a new family making better choices in my 30s. I was still young enough at 35 to run with my sons, take them to the gym with me. At 85 not so much.
Are we really arguing that there are opportunities you have between 30-50 that you can’t make up for between 70-90?
Would you rather have been Steve Jobs or Ronald Wayne?