[LINK] Why did Steve Jobs choose not to effectively treat his cancer?

From Quora:

"Now Mr. Jobs always was a free thinker, a strong believer in spirituality, a vegetarian and a known skeptic of conventional medicine. He chose to reject conventional medicine altogether. He's not alone in that. We come across many people like this and we all know someone in our midst that uses homeopathy or has this known fear of anything "chemical" (to those I always say that everything is chemical, if you think dihydrogen oxide sounds scary you should stop drinking water). Individual freedom of thought and choice is a cornerstone of our modern society and the medical world makes no exception."

From Quora:

"Now Mr. Jobs always was a free thinker, a strong believer in spirituality, a vegetarian and a known skeptic of conventional medicine. He chose to reject conventional medicine altogether. He's not alone in that. We come across many people like this and we all know someone in our midst that uses homeopathy or has this known fear of anything "chemical" (to those I always say that everything is chemical, if you think dihydrogen oxide sounds scary you should stop drinking water). Individual freedom of thought and choice is a cornerstone of our modern society and the medical world makes no exception."

a doctor whose primary interest is

I am guessing from the way this is written that the sentence began as "a doctor whose primary interest is to fill out insurance forms" and then grew to be about "a doctor whose important interests include X, Y, and Z".

The reason I point this out is to say that it looks like you overwhelmed a bad cached thought pattern with subject-specific good thinking. The bad thought pattern is to assume that if there isn't a good predominant intention, there must be a predominant intention that isn't good.

The primary, strongest intention of the doctor could be to heal the patient with that being a very small part of his or her total motivation.

It is also important to note that intentions are less aligned with consequences than we tend to think. As Tolkien probably never said: not all purposes that wander are lost. There is a relationship between e.g. quality health care and low legal risk; information is lost at each instrumental value waystation from actions to terminal values, but humans are deft enough to usually not let it dissipate into nothingness.

Your argument seems ideological to me. I certainly agree, this is how things should work, but I would see evidence before believing that the average medical professional really does learn from their mistakes.

2buybuydandavis15y

That's probably true. In this case, I likely expanded with the litany of other distortions as I expanded the scope of my reply. But often, I find I engage in defensive writing and go back and qualify and expand just to fend of nitpicking. [...] I think that people arguing against me fall into that pattern - take my comments as an attack on doctors. I'm primarily attacking a system that subordinates my interests to the interests of a doctor, whose interests are subordinated to the medical industry and government. I went to a doctor who wanted a private practice largely for the freedom to prescribe and help patients without a clinic's institutional oversight. We had a nice chat about it. There was a treatment I found with multiple papers showing efficacy, and further papers showing safety at much higher doses than I was proposing. But the medicine was off patent, and had fallen into disuse. While he granted that it looked promising, he was concerned about liability on all sides, and those concerns made him feel he had to do extensive research on the drug before prescribing it. But he's not in the business of spending hours digging up research papers for a single patient. Not cost effective, for him. I don't blame him at all. I'm not saying his interests are bad, they're just not identical with mine. My post was pointing out the numerous ways the institutional interests and incentives of "traditional medicine" are not aligned with the health and interests of patients, and the advantages that non traditional (and particularly, non regulated) treatments have over traditional medicine in that regard. As far as "bad intentions", I don't blame doctors for trying to make money. I don't blame companies either. Again, I blame the supporters of a system that distorts the interests of doctors and companies and prevents me from pursuing my interests through legal channels, and opens me to criminal liability if I pursue my interests in my own health. I don't even say these p

4dlthomas15y

Did you borrow that from somewhere? I find it quite a clear statement of a common problem.

14

[LINK] Why did Steve Jobs choose not to effectively treat his cancer?

14

14

14

[LINK] Why did Steve Jobs choose not to effectively treat his cancer?

14

14