Well done, Mr. Jobs.
Well done, Mr. Ritchie
I was shocked to see Steve Jobs’ untimely death blamed, without reservation, on the quackery that is “alternative medicine” — referred to here as though “alternative medicine” were a single, uniform entity instead of the rag-tag lost brigade of wishful thinking, innovation, philosophical excess, and common sense that it is. As a number of voices chimed in with an excerpt from Tim Minchin’s Storm: “”You know what they call ‘alternative medicine’ that’s been proved to work? Medicine.” Well said!
I can guarantee this will work... but only once
And particularly appropriate because, if you look back to the scientific revolution as it intersects with medicine — especially in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th — you will see an ironic trend. Medicine — you know, bleeding, trepanning, the obvious truth that miasmas caused infection, and an extreme paranoia on the topic of masturbation — was confronted by an implacable sequence of “alternative medicine” based, not on the time honored tradition of the medical trade, but on scientific fact. Many of these scientists were accused of quackery. Many unavoidable deaths were blamed on “alternative medicine.” The close-mindedness of traditional practitioners is often lampooned in costume dramas. They make quite excellent minor villains AND double as comic relief!
My point here is not that we should thrown down the walls of our skepticism and embrace every nutty theory out there (personally, I find the ideas that water responds to written words reflecting human intentionality, most purgative diets, and almost all homeopathy offensive in their nuttiness). But conversely, discarding idea B or practice Y out-of-hand because they don’t fit into the canon of accepted treatment methodologies is by definition close-minded. Everything must be proved and nothing can be assumed. And, no matter what the anti-mad-hatter types are saying in these blogs, the idea that diet and health are linked is an EXTREMELY SOUND medical theory. Can anyone honestly argue that Jobs’ belief in this link was nonsensical? Perhaps even more importantly, consensus in the medical community is a conundrum — developing the “proof” to determine whether a treatment is viable and productive can take, quite literally, generations. Let us remember that lobotomy, trepanning’s smarter, better-dressed city cousin, achieved its heyday in the 50s and 60s — the same time period that brought us widespread television, the first computing devices, xeroxes, and modern bureaucracy. This was “alternative medicine that has been proven to work.”
I’m sorry Steve Jobs is dead: I think he would have been well-advised to have pursued the Whipple procedure early instead of delaying 9 months, and as Mr. Dunning rightly points out, there is no evidence that diet effects the type of carcinoma Jobs was originally diagnosed with. Until a decade or two ago, the Whipple procedure still had catastrophically high mortality rates; enough to give pause. It is entirely possible that he was surveying exactly the history I’ve glossed above when he…. hesitated. But Jobs was never one to accept common knowledge at face value; Apple’s success can pretty accurately be described as an alternative technology being presented in an alternative way. I would sooner blame Steve (if blame is even necessary) for choosing to pause, than to blame “alternative medicine” — crackpots, visionaries, and pioneers alike — for daring to be alternative.
ADDENDUM: If you are an adherent of homeopathy, purgative diets, or writing love letters on your water bottles so your water will feel good, I apologize for targeting you above. I still think you’re crazy, but hope you won’t feel to bad about it =)
