Adam Ostrow: “By the end of this year, there’ll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites. The one thing that all of them have in common is that they are going to die.”
We are quickly approaching overload on articles about the late Steve Jobs, but Martin Wolf’s post in the Financial Times on what Jobs’ career teaches us is definitely worth a read.
In short, Wolf explains that Jobs was the quintessential American entrepreneur who was able to marry form with function while bringing a showman’s bravado in promoting Apple products. Not a bad prescription for success.
Meanwhile, David Gorski provides this interesting analysis of Jobs’ bout with the pernicious disease that killed him, pancreatic cancer. Inasmuch as that cancer deprived Houston of one of its greatest teachers, I have followed the clinical research on the disease with interest over the past several years. Dr. Gorski does a masterful job of explaining the complexities involved in treating pancreatic cancer, while also taking a well-deserved swipe at the snake-oil salesmen who were quick to seize upon Jobs’ tragic death to hawk their “alternative treatments” for this deadly disease.
One of many good points that Dr. Gorski makes is the risk that patients such as Jobs take in delaying surgery on cancers such as this while exploring alternative medicine treatments:
If there’s one thing we’re learning increasingly about cancer, it’s that biology is king and queen, and that our ability to fight biology is depressingly limited. In retrospect, we can now tell that Jobs clearly had a tumor that was unusually aggressive for an insulinoma. Such tumors are usually pretty indolent and progress only slowly. Indeed, I’ve seen patients and known a friend of a friend who survived many years with metastatic neuroendocrine tumors with reasonable quality of life.
Jobs was unfortunate in that he appears to have had an unusually aggressive form of the disease that might well have ultimately killed him no matter what. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t take into account his delay in treatment and wonder if it contributed to his ultimate demise. It very well might have, the key word being “might.” We don’t know that it did, which is one reason why we have to be very, very careful not to overstate the case and attribute his death as being definitely due to the delay in therapy due to his wanting to “go alternative.”
Finally, Jobs’ case illustrates the difficulties with applying SBM to rare diseases. When a disease is as uncommon as insulinomas are, it’s very difficult for practitioners to know what the best course of action is, and that uncertainty can make for decisions that are seemingly bizarre or inexplicable but that, if you have all the information, are supportable based on what we currently know.
In short, despite the advances of modern medicine, there is still much that we do not know about how disease attacks our bodies.
Patients beware.
Regardless of what you think about Al Gore’s books, the format of his latest is pretty cool.
This Chris Sorensen/Macleans.CA article provides an excellent overview of an issue that is of interest to all air travelers – that is, the increasing number of loss-of-control airline accidents over the past five years:
Statistically speaking, modern avionics have made flying safer than ever. But the crash of [Turkish] Flight 1951 is just one of several recent, high-profile reminders that minor problems can quickly snowball into horrific disasters when pilots don’t understand the increasingly complex systems in the cockpit, or don’t use them properly. The point was hammered home later that year when Air France Flight 447 stalled at nearly 38,000 feet and ended up crashing into the Atlantic, killing all 228 on board. . . [. . .]
Why is it happening? Some argue that the sheer complexity of modern flight systems, though designed to improve safety and reliability, can overwhelm even the most experienced pilots when something actually goes wrong. Others say an increasing reliance on automated flight may be dulling pilots’ sense of flying a plane, leaving them ill-equipped to take over in an emergency. Still others question whether pilot-training programs have lagged behind the industry’s rapid technological advances.
It’s a vexing problem for airlines, and a worrisome one for their customers. Unlike mechanical failures that can be traced to flawed design or poor maintenance, there is no easy fix when experienced and highly trained pilots make seemingly inexplicable decisions that end with a US$250-million airplane literally falling out of the sky. “The best you can do is teach pilots to understand automation and not to fight it,” [flight simulation expert Sunjoo] Advani says, noting that the focus in recent years has, perhaps myopically, been on simplifying and speeding up training regimes, secure in the knowledge that planes have never been smarter or safer. “We’ve worked ourselves into a little bit of a corner here. Now we have to work ourselves back out.”
Read the entire article. And then have a stiff drink before you get on your next commercial flight.