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Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

RIP Steve Jobs. It was likely his Apple-only diet that did him in. He would go to these orchards in NorCal and disappear for weeks on end, eating only apples the whole time. He tried eating apples aggressively to cure his colon cancer and it appears to have exacerbated it.

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The lesson from Jobs is not "don't eat too much fruit", it's "listen to your doctors when they tell you to treat your cancer".

I don’t think that’s a fair judgement. Sure, from the outside the decision to ignore medical advice seems crazy, but in the end it was his decision and he paid for it. Would a billion rounds of chemo have saved him? Maybe, but it’s also likely he would have ended up in the same spot anyways. We are all human, and doctors are just humans that are more well informed about the subject than others but are still human, and in the end it’s all just an experiment to see if this works better than that or that. So I think the lesson should be, if you get cancer then you should be able to finish your days, in your own way if you decide.

He had a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor which is potentially curable. But instead of getting treated immediately he dicked around trying to cure it with woo woo.

Jobs had an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, a rare type of pancreatic cancer.

He decided to delay surgical treatment in favor of dietary treatment presumably because at the time there was little evidence for the effectiveness of surgical treatment (and obviously plenty of risk connected to it).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4924574/

This gets mentioned in the angriest (rightly so) obituary-cum-book review I have ever seen written about anyone ever.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUK144083343120120222

(the biopsy line was originally after the quote from the wife abut not opening his body yet)

Good grief, you're right. Any idea why the author was so harsh?

Great article, thanks for sharing. Not nearly enough iconoclasts on HN sometimes – a good take-down is well appreciated.

Thank-you for that.

> a policy prohibiting employees from talking to one another about any topic about which both parties have not yet been officially "disclosed"--Distortionspeak for "cleared to discuss"--by a higher authority.

The most modern of which I've seen so far is Conjecture's infohazard policy:

https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/Gs29k3beHiqWFZqnn/conje...

I can't find the HN submission anymore.

This is simply not true and reads like a convenient anecdote to make a point.

"Founder of Apple only eats... apples! Omg lol"

It's mostly true AFAIK, according to Walter Isaacson's biography.

I don't think he disappeared for weeks in orchards, but he would reportedly eat only apples for weeks at a time, or carrots. He was a "fruitarian" for a period of time. [1]

And he didn't eat only apples to cure his cancer, but he did choose things like "dietary supplements and juices" specifically to cure his cancer, instead of modern medical recommentations. Which he then regretted when the cancer progressed. [2]

It's not a random coincidence that he named the company Apple. He was really into apples, like more than anybody you've probably ever met.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/strange-eating-habits-ste...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

apples he found.

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