Request for Prayers
November 12, 2024
I am asking friends and well-wishers to pray for me.
I believe that group intention can actually make a difference.
On October first, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Because of vascular involvement, surgery is not possible. I am taking weekly chemo treatments to shrink the tumor before surgical resection. I am tolerating the chemo pretty well, and I am in good spirits. Every day I make a point of getting out in the sun and walking with Cai and Poppy.
I am receiving excellent care for my physical body from a team of doctors and nurses at Stanford and UCSF. I am also receiving several different modalities of holistic treatments for my emotional and spiritual health. The treatments are helping, and I am feeling much less pain now. I am even regaining a little of the weight that I lost.
From my Iboga experience seven years ago, I know for certain that my consciousness and memories will continue after I leave my physical body. I have no existential fear of death. Actually more anticipation and curiosity.
At 73 years, I have already lived an amazing and wonderful life. I have loved and been loved, beginning with my remarkable mother who believed in me. With my work at Apple and General Magic I am grateful that I could make positive contributions to the lives of many millions of people, and even affect the course of human evolution.
But I want more quality time to share life and experiences with Cai and with my friends and family. My bucket list is not filled with places to travel, but instead with quality time with those I love and those who love me.
I am living my life filled with gratitude. Each day is a special gift to be unwrapped, enjoyed, and cherished.
Thank you for praying for me.
Bill Atkinson
I should point out: pancreatic cancer is not a death sentence, but the prognosis is generally very bad. I lost my wife, who was half Bill's age, to the disease.
I initial thought it was a weird coincidence that both him and Steve Jobs got pancreatic cancer. But then I checked and the lifetime risk of pancreatic cancer for a man is like 1:50, which is sort of insane:
When I lived in the Bay Area I was told there were some fucked up chemicals used in the production of PCBs that remained in the water from the valley's Golden Era (?). Perhaps there is something in the water then?
Depends on where in the Bay Area. SF gets water from Hetch Hetchy which is really clean. The rest of the peninsula is hit or miss. Some get water from reservoirs fed by the mountain streams which should be safe but anyone using groundwater from the Valley might be in danger.
Wait till you find out what the risk of Alzheimer’s is for someone over 100 years old. (Hint at 120 it’s currently estimated at around 100%)
It’s basically what disease is going to kill you first.
So I find efforts by Bryan Johnson to increase his lifespan pretty idiotic- he won’t be able to avoid the cancer and the Alzheimer’s risks as he ages - to my knowledge nothing In his routines is very effective against those.
The best time in history to have cancer is now, and we need to make sure that statement continues to be true for every year yet to come. Having cancer is still some of the worst news an individual can hear. And it’s nigh but inevitable; we roll the dice every second.
A lot of the issue is the hush-hush manner we treat the subject with, IMO, and the “us vs. them” mentality with the “pharma industry”. I don’t think anybody should criticize Steve for his course of treatment, but the charlatans that led him down that path. For every Steve Jobs there are thousands of Steves with a similar story.
The story afaict is less charlatans and more Jobs' hubris and ignoring his doctors. He has a pretty long history of questionable health decisions from what I have read.
In October 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. In mid 2004, he announced to his employees that he had a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is very poor; *Jobs stated that he had a rare, less aggressive type, known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.*
Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months, in favor of alternative medicine. Other doctors agree that Jobs's diet was insufficient to address his disease. However, cancer researcher and alternative medicine critic David Gorski wrote that "it's impossible to know whether and by how much he might have decreased his chances of surviving his cancer through his flirtation with woo. My best guess was that Jobs probably only modestly decreased his chances of survival, if that." Barrie R. Cassileth, the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department, on the other hand, said, "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life ... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable ... He essentially committed suicide."
He committed suicide, but more importantly in my view is that he needlessly used a donated organ that could have gone to someone that actually needed it. A real hero that guy.
Did not know his was neuroendocrine. But still, something or somebody led him down that path (or rather, a multitude of someones and somethings, over who-knows-what timeframe). It's sad - not because it was Steve Jobs, but because it's an example of something that in aggregate would lead to substantially less suffering if people understood what was even possible.
I've known a few smart people that died of things that they could have had a high change of not dying from if they took proper action when they first found out. For instance, I've known 2 separate Christian Scientists with (different, treatable - often curable without so much as minor surgery) Stage I or II cancers, who ended up withering away for a few years before passing.
Interestingly, where I am they take no money - and give the same advice. My partner just received the all-clear after detecting it early, following advice, and attacking it early. And the doctors got paid the same as if she’d never existed.
There are ways you can have an impact, even with a modest contribution. Find a high-quality research lab, like the Monje lab at Stanford, and make a direct charitable contribution. I went through a number of cancer research foundations' 990s and I was dismayed at the very small percentage of their donations that ended up going directly to cancer research. As someone whose father and mother and aunt and several uncles died of cancer, it matters a lot to me that we make progress on fighting cancer!
CAR-T cell therapies in particular seem to be curing cases previously thought incurable. Just this week we saw the Monje lab make forward progress on curing certain pediatric brain cancers!
Part of the problem with pancreatic cancer is detection. Most people (like my dad) are only catching it when it is stage 3 or stage 4 and you're already way on the wrong side of the odds. If you catch pancreatic cancer as stage 1 or stage 2 in most cases the odds are basically 50/50.
Your reply does not deserve to be flagged. "Holistic medicine" is just one of the many rebrandings of "alternative medicine." Maybe I wouldn't have put it exactly that way, but "holistic" is definitely one of those key words that should gently sound the quackery alert. Like "herbal" and "detox" and "homeopathy" and "naturopathy" and so on.
