Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelmachine | Hacker News Reader

>>potentially better medicine

Jobs refused conventional treatment to treat his cancer until it was too late. He placed heavy emphasis on oriental mysticism.

View on HN

While that's true, pancreatic cancer is nasty enough that even with prompt treatment, there was a good chance he'd succumb to it anyway, although he'd definitely have way better chances.

His cancer was the least deadly of the cancers and with treatment he would have lived much longer. My mom had stage one pancreatic cancer 4 years ago and she is still alive today and cancer free for over four years. So it is possible.

There's pancreatic cancer and cancer of the pancreas. (There might be more, i know about these two). The difference in life expectancy is staggering. One is basically starting the clock (in months to a handful of years), with the other, recovery is possible.

Pancreatic cancer essentially forms a barrier around the cancer that prevents drugs from reaching the tumors as I understood layman's descriptions of the disease when one of my friends died of it.

I think there was some initial success in attaching vitamin d to some drugs to bypass the "firewall", but it was still hard.

FWIW, Jobs was diagnosed in 2003, so he lived another 8 years after his initial diagnosis.

Which says to me that he was a good candidate for real treatment.

Yeah, I'm not sure how such an intelligent person could get suckered in by that mumbo jumbo. I guess one can be a savante in some things and dumb as a rock at others.

The specific kind of pancreatic cancer that Jobs had was not very aggressive, unlike the majority of pancreatic cancers.

IIRC, he had insulinoma, which is a rather slow cancer. I’m not sure if treatment beyond surgery would have prolonged his life, as 10 year survival is around 30%.

Pancreatic adenocarcinoma is the fast killer.

There is a lot of conjecture about Jobs death, I try to avoid delving into speculation too much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com