Athena

Last night I watched the BBC documentary about Steve Jobs – Steve Jobs :Billion Dollar Hippy. It was an interesting documentary, well balanced and with the usual euphemisms.

Image Credit: davidgalbraith.org

What struck me at the end though, was that when Jobs diagnosed with cancer, he delayed having  surgery for 9 months after he was diagnosed. Instead he tried alternative therapies and a strictly vegan diet to fight the disease, despite the advice of his doctors and people close to him.

I thought “What a stupid idea! That cannot be true”.   Well, it seems it is.  I don’t say that this cost him his life, I don’t know and maybe we will never know, but it is also true that the early stages after diagnosis are the most critical. One of the people close to Jobs said that “Steve was an unconventional person and when it came to treating his illness he was very happy to use non-traditional methods.

ΗAPPY! He said happy, I thought. The man who many regard as genius was “happy” to use alternative methods to treat his cancer.

I have expressed my opinion about the alternative medicine (check antiscience tag), no reason to say more, here. Also, I don’t regard Steve Jobs as genius, a great synthesist perhaps, someone who was able to see and understand all the components and put them together, creating  an attractive and original product.  A clever and authentic man, nevertheless.

It is the human mind that fascinates me and concerns me.  What makes a clever man, such as Steve Jobs , in his most critical moment of his life to abandon logic and waste his talent and his life indeed, in such foolish way.