Steve Jobs and Acupuncture

The death of Steve Jobs caused a remarkable stir.  That’s understandable, because Jobs undoubtedly had a dramatic impact on our lives.  His technological vision changed the way we compute and communicate.  Even if you’ve never owned an Apple product, your experience of technology has been altered and improved because of the advances made by Apple, largely under Jobs’s leadership.

Here’s another way Steve Jobs could provide a benefit to humanity. 

It has become public knowledge that when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Jobs first looked to acupuncture, herbal treatments and other “Complementary and Alternative Medicine.” 

It is also now known that he regretted that choice.  Acupuncture, as apparently became evident to Jobs, has no hope of effectively treating cancer.  The other “alternative” methods Jobs apparently tried are in the same boat.  They have no biological plausibility and no demonstrated efficacy in well-performed trials. 

I do not, of course, know what was in Jobs’s mind.  And I cannot, of course, say that starting real medicine sooner would have extended Jobs’s life.  I do know, though, assuming Jobs’s official biographer has it right, that even a person with the spiritual and non-traditional preferences of Steve Jobs realized that non-treatments (acupuncture and the like) were not helping.

I’ve talked to people who say things like “science just doesn’t know how to test for the holistic effects of these treatments.”  Bollocks and hogwash, I say.  If it’s supposedly a medical treatment then its efficacy should be determinable in comparatively simple trials.  Give the “treatment” to one group, give a sham treatment to a second group, and give no treatment at all to a third group.  Don’t let anyone who receives treatment know if their treatment is real or sham.  And don’t let those who administer the treatments or evaluate the results know who got real or sham treatment. 

When these kinds of trials are performed for, say, acupuncture, on a sufficiently large group, even investigators who are invested in acupuncture seem to end up with no effect, or with a “non-specific" (another way of saying “placebo”) effect.

Acupuncture is nonsense.  If you’ve got a headache, then by all means go have your acupuncture.  If you have a cold, go ahead.  Your cold is going to go away on its own in a few days anyway, and acupuncture is not going to hurt you (unless you get an infection or even a punctured lung and die, which happens far too often, given that acupuncture provides no positive benefit).  If you have a real non self-limiting illness, though, don’t go there. 

Steve Jobs leaves an out-sized legacy.  I hope that part of that legacy will extend to people who otherwise would have used ineffective magical treatments, but who now will limit themselves to reality.

If the death of Steve Jobs puts one more nail in the coffin of magical wishful-thinking “treatments” like acupuncture, then his legacy is even greater for it.