I am sorry to piggyback this discussion of causal ascriptions on the death of a man I greatly admired and respected. However, we need to be very careful about blame in these cases. Naturopathy is a (mostly harmless) substitute for medical treatment, and since medical treatment is usually not needed (in the case of treating colds and the like) it doesn’t matter. But if it is a replacement for medical care when medical care can do some real good, then it becomes a serious sociological and political issue.
When naturopathy causes people not to take medications or vaccinations that work, then we should attack it. When it keeps poor people from getting medical treatment for economic reasons and false advertising, then it is a political issue. In this case, however, Jobs, who had access to medical treatment and information of the best kind, chose to manage his illness in a manner that slightly hastened his death, probably. And that’s about all we can say. It was his right to do that, though we may lament the outcome.
The guy had a liver transplant at one point. Doesn’t sounds very much like naturopathy to me.
There’s a back and forth debate going on about how he put off his initial surgery and medical treatment for a year while he investigated alternative medicine cures for a quickly metastasizing pancreatic cancer.
Look, there will be plenty of time to second-guess the past later - for now let’s just take a bit longer to appreciate that he lived in the first place before we begin to examine how he died.
“Putting off” in Job’s case was a sort of very specific thing, though. He almost certainly was in the queue for a liver in California while doing his investigations - there’s been no indication he wasn’t. What he did put off was picking up sticks and moving to Tennessee to get in a shorter queue. I don’t think the picture of him literally ignoring medical science while he investigated natural solutions is an accurate one. Maybe he should have moved earlier (since, unlike many of us, he could afford to), but it doesn’t mean he was stalling necessarily.
The very sad truth is, pancreatic cancer is almost always fatal within 5 years (5 year survival rate: 1%). Maybe he could have prolonged his life further, but at what cost? If this is how he chose to deal with an unfortunately fatal illness, his choice.
