I am a huge fan of Steve Jobs.  As an Apple devotee since the Mac Classic, I have admired the brilliance with which he has meticulously melded technology and design.  

His passing is a tremendous loss.  If you read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, you will learn how his vision and his obsession with details transformed the computer industry with Apple's proprietary integrative approach, Animation Motion Pictures with his shepherding of Pixar, the Music Industry with his development of iTunes and the iPod, the Mobile Phone Industry with iPhone, the Retail Industry with Apple Stores and the Post Personal Computer Industry with iPad and iCloud.

I was born in 1955, the same year as Steve Jobs, so I have a visceral feeling that he has left us too soon.

Why?  What happened?

The popular narrative that's circulating is that he was diagnosed with a tumor in his pancreas, he decided not to have surgery and opted instead to try to heal himself "naturally" with alternative modalities.  After 9 months, the tumor had grown and spread and he finally had surgery.  Five years later, he needed a liver transplant, but he finally succumbed to the cancer two years later.  The 9 months he had waited after the first diagnosis led to a preventable premature death.

"See!" many people are saying.  "All that crazy alternative medicine stuff was bogus and it killed him."

Since, I am in the alternative medicine field, trained by a clinical nutritionist  who cleared herself naturopathically of ovarian cancer, I was interested to know what Steve Jobs did during that 9 month window.

First of all, I want to make one thing clear.  When it comes to pancreatic cancer, or more specifically in Steve Jobs' case, a neuroendocrine pancreatic tumor, every responsible practitioner of alternative medicine would have told Steve Jobs to get the tumor surgically removed.  Alternative medicine is a good option if you've had NO success with conventional allopathic medicine or if the allopathic treatment offered has such a low success rate that it's worth it to try something else.

Now before we indict  the nutritionist and healers who tried to help Steve Jobs once he had REFUSED to have surgery, lets look at what Steve Jobs brought and didn't bring to the table.  As a young man, Jobs would go on occasional fasts to induce a Buddhic euphoria.  He had a severe eating disorder which led him to alternate between eating nothing but fruit or eating just one single food (such as carrots) for a week or two and then drop it and pick another single food.

According to Isaacson's bio, even when Jobs was diagnosed with cancer he continued his strange "unhealthy" eating habits and random fasts.  

Steve Jobs created what family and colleagues called a "Reality Distortion Field" when faced with a problem or certain facts that he didn't like.  Steve Jobs would perceive reality his own way.  This led him to create tranformative products and re-invent several industries.  However, in regards to his health, it led to premature death.

Whether you are doing surgery, radiation, chemo-therapy or targeted nutrition and other healing modalities, you CANNOT, you WILL NOT, heal if you do not feed your body the necessary nutrients your cells need to duplicate, cleanse and function.

His wife, his doctors, his colleagues, his children begged him to eat a more healthy balanced diet to recover and he simply refused.  He could bend the reality of the world around him,  but not the basic needs of his own body.

We will miss Steve Jobs.  The world is a better place thanks to his unique expertise standing square on the intersection of "Art" and "Technology."

And his passing is a cautionary tale.  Whatever healing path you choose should illness strike you, your best chance for success is to feed your body what it needs to rejuvenate.

And yet, we are grateful for the time he was here, where he dedicated himself and inspired others to create and produce things that were in his words, "Insanely great!"