Maybe prompt surgical treatment of Steve Jobs’s relatively curable form of pancreatic cancer would have made him live longer, maybe not. In any case, for most of a year, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson, he resorted to “fruit juices…acupuncture…herbal remedies…treatments he found on the Internet…a psychic,” and so on. “I think that he kind of felt that if you don’t want something to exist,” Isaacson says, “you can have magical thinking” and make it go away. I think of Steve Jobs when I see my neighbors at Whole Foods flipping through the monthly magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You
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