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Comment by canucker2016 | Hacker News Reader

canucker2016

Steve Jobs also had pancreatic cancer.

Quincy Jones just died from pancreatic cancer.

The best time in history to have cancer is now, and we need to make sure that statement continues to be true for every year yet to come. Having cancer is still some of the worst news an individual can hear. And it’s nigh but inevitable; we roll the dice every second.

A lot of the issue is the hush-hush manner we treat the subject with, IMO, and the “us vs. them” mentality with the “pharma industry”. I don’t think anybody should criticize Steve for his course of treatment, but the charlatans that led him down that path. For every Steve Jobs there are thousands of Steves with a similar story.

5 year survival for pancreatic cancer is 12%

https://pancan.org/news/five-year-pancreatic-cancer-survival...

We are seeing some cancer breakthroughs but we’ve got a lot of work remaining

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-69006713.amp

The story afaict is less charlatans and more Jobs' hubris and ignoring his doctors. He has a pretty long history of questionable health decisions from what I have read.

In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In mid 2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is very poor; *Jobs stated that he had a rare, less aggressive type, known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.*

Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months, in favor of alternative medicine. Other doctors agree that Jobs's diet was insufficient to address his disease. However, cancer researcher and alternative medicine critic David Gorski wrote that "it's impossible to know whether and by how much he might have decreased his chances of surviving his cancer through his flirtation with woo. My best guess was that Jobs probably only modestly decreased his chances of survival, if that." Barrie R. Cassileth, the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department, on the other hand, said, "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life ... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable ... He essentially committed suicide."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs (under Health problems)

Did not know his was neuroendocrine. But still, something or somebody led him down that path (or rather, a multitude of someones and somethings, over who-knows-what timeframe). It's sad - not because it was Steve Jobs, but because it's an example of something that in aggregate would lead to substantially less suffering if people understood what was even possible.

I've known a few smart people that died of things that they could have had a high change of not dying from if they took proper action when they first found out. For instance, I've known 2 separate Christian Scientists with (different, treatable - often curable without so much as minor surgery) Stage I or II cancers, who ended up withering away for a few years before passing.

He committed suicide, but more importantly in my view is that he needlessly used a donated organ that could have gone to someone that actually needed it. A real hero that guy.

Doctors say you must listen to doctors or you'll die. Give your money to doctors if you want to live.

Weird to see such self-destructive intellectual nihilism on Hacker News.

One needn't pay doctors to find out what they know, it's all there in the literature that can be found in a library.

Interestingly, where I am they take no money - and give the same advice. My partner just received the all-clear after detecting it early, following advice, and attacking it early. And the doctors got paid the same as if she’d never existed.

There are ways you can have an impact, even with a modest contribution. Find a high-quality research lab, like the Monje lab at Stanford, and make a direct charitable contribution. I went through a number of cancer research foundations' 990s and I was dismayed at the very small percentage of their donations that ended up going directly to cancer research. As someone whose father and mother and aunt and several uncles died of cancer, it matters a lot to me that we make progress on fighting cancer!

CAR-T cell therapies in particular seem to be curing cases previously thought incurable. Just this week we saw the Monje lab make forward progress on curing certain pediatric brain cancers!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08171-9

Jef Raskin also had pancreatic cancer.

All these people too. Hopefully someday we make an effort to cure it. We’ve made so little progress.

Randy Pausch - Last Lecture

Steve Jobs

Patrick Swayze

Sally Ride - astronaut

Piers Sellers - astronaut

Hans Rosling

Richard Hatch

Michael Landon

Bill Hicks - Comedian

Jef Raskin - Macintosh

Aretha Franklin

Luciano Pavarotti

Sharon Jones

Alan Rickman

Dizzy Gillespie

Benoit Mandelbrot

Wernher von Braun

Matt Bencke, former CEO of Mighty AI (bought by Uber in 2019).

He was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Trigger warning: https://www.wired.com/story/the-day-i-found-out-my-life-was-...

Part of the problem with pancreatic cancer is detection. Most people (like my dad) are only catching it when it is stage 3 or stage 4 and you're already way on the wrong side of the odds. If you catch pancreatic cancer as stage 1 or stage 2 in most cases the odds are basically 50/50.

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