Steve Jobs ‘chose spiritualists over surgery’

APPLE co-founder Steve Jobs refused potentially life-saving cancer surgery for nine months, shrugging off his family’s protests and opting instead for alternative medicine, according to his biographer.

When he eventually sought surgery, the rare form of pancreatic cancer had spread to the tissues surrounding the organ, biographer Walter Isaacson said in an interview to be aired tomorrow. Jobs also played down the seriousness of his condition and told everyone he was cured but kept receiving treatment in secret, Isaacson said in the interview on CBS television.

The biography, to be published on Monday, was written after scores of interviews with Jobs. It is expected to paint an unprecedented, no-holds-barred portrait of a man who guarded his privacy fiercely but whose death ignited a global outpouring of grief and tribute.

The book reveals that Jobs was bullied at school, tried various quirky diets as a teenager, and exhibited early strange behaviour such as staring at others without blinking, reports suggest.

In his interview, Isaacson confirmed details including that Jobs might have been cured of his “slow-growing” cancer had he sought professional treatment sooner, rather than resorting to unconventional means.

Jobs deeply regretted putting off a decision that might have ultimately saved his life, according to Isaacson.

“He tries to treat it with diet. He goes to spiritualists. He goes to various ways of doing it macrobiotically and he doesn’t get an operation,” Isaacson said.

“I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking. We talked about this a lot.”

Jobs announced in August 2004 that he had undergone surgery to remove a cancerous tumour from his pancreas. In 2008 and 2009 – as his dwindling weight stirred increasing alarm in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street – he said first that he was fighting a “common bug”, then that he was suffering from a hormone imbalance.

In 2009, news emerged that he had undergone a liver transplant.

Jobs died on 5 October at the age of 56. Outpourings of sympathy swept across the globe as state leaders, business rivals and fans paid their respects to the man who touched the daily lives of countless millions through the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

He had never revealed much about his life or thinking – until he commissioned Isaacson for a biography he hoped would let his children know him better.

The book sheds new light on how Jobs’ relationship with Eric Schmidt, his long-time friend and former Apple board member who became chief executive of Google, unravelled when the internet search giant chose to go toe-to-toe with Apple in the smartphone arena.

According to one account of the biography, Jobs went on an expletive-laced rant against what he called “grand theft” after Google launched its Android mobile software on phones made by Taiwan’s HTC Corp in 2010. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs is cited as saying in the book.