Considering Steve Jobs, Medical Diagnoses and Privacy

Yesterday morning I wrote a short post on CelebrityDiagnosis.com. By evening, news broke that Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs resigned from his position, presumably for reasons of his health.

What’s public, by Jobs’ decision, is that he had a relatively good, typically slow-growing kind of malignancy in the pancreas, a neuroendocrine islet cell tumor. He informed Apple employees by email about his diagnosis in 2004, when he was 49 years old. Since then he’s had a liver transplant. Possible complications of that surgery, or the tumor itself, have led to considerable speculation. But little is known about the details of why he took medical leave in January and is stepping down now.

In a published letter to the Apple Board and Community, he wrote yesterday: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”

The letter was “short and classy,” in David Pogue’s words, and I agree. I respect Jobs’ decision to keep the details of his medical condition private. That’s the thing – and where this is post is heading.

When public figures are open about their illnesses, it can be helpful, instructive and even necessary. For example, if a political figure, say Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez or Dick Cheney, with considerable power develops a cancer or has a stroke or a heart attack or some other serious medical problem, the citizens have the right to know that the condition of the person they rely on has changed.

Sometimes it’s instructive to learn about famous people’s medical stories, as is illustrated in Barron Lerner’s book, When Illness Goes Public: Celebrity Patients and How We Look at Medicine. Openness about breast cancer by women like Happy Rockefeller, Rose Kushner and more recently Elizabeth Edwards (to name a few among many) have helped women move forward, from being ashamed of having BC to understanding about what it’s like to live with the disease. They helped other women to understand this disease, through their generosity of personal stories and experience.

The problem is that in our culture there’s so much openness about medical conditions, individuals may feel compelled to tell what’s happening if they have cancer or a recurrence or some other unfortunate medical event. But not everyone wants to do so, nor should they feel obliged.

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Related Posts:

• Steve Jobs Takes a Medical Leave
• Why Not Tweet When You Are In the Hospital and Not Feeling Well?
• Learning About Lou Gehrig, his Diagnosis, Disability and Pride
• The ‘Journal’ Asks, Should Patients Have Identification Numbers?
• Noting the Death of Christopher Hitchens from Esophageal Cancer