Except he was told by any sane, rational doctor that waiting 9 months is the equivalent of rolling nothing. You can't let a tumor sit around for 9 months hoping bamboo shoots and green tea enemas cure your cancer. I can't see how this is remotely rational.

Those are our odds. His odds, considering his vast wealthy, would be potentially better (better doctors, hospitals, etc). So in other words he chose a the best high-risk naturopath approach over the best low-risk surgical approach. He found the best woo merchants out there and he paid for it with his life. I'm not sure why so many are defending him. Yes, he made consumer goods slightly better than his competition, but he's still human and made a pretty terrible mistake. If anything, we should publicize this so other people don't make this mistake.

I've known a few people, close friends parents and a family member die of cancer. You can struggle on through chemo and radiation therapy for 4-5 years or you can go in 6 months. I'm not sure I can say which one is best. The ops are by no means magic cures, if you survive the op you are in a lot of pain from chemo and radio therapy. Example, Morphine sickness is pretty horrific. Quite common for people to reject it and take the pain because you feel so bad on it.

Having seen that and if I knew that I had a cancer which was very unlikely to be cured I would definitely consider not going through with the surgery. Better to die quickly than live in constant pain for another 5 years?

Its easy to make the stretch to trying a bit of alt medicine. It's is not going to make things any worse than they are, if anything the placebo effect of feeling you are in control is probably quite strong.

I don't think it's easy for a healthy person to understand what's going through someones mind when they're faced with this.

Green tea actually does have cancer-fighting properties, it's anti-angiogenic. It's also involved in preventing and/or reversing the methylation of epigeneteic cancer genes.

That sounds nice, but is there good evidence that this actually happens, or that if it happens that it improves outcomes or quality of life? A bit of time on Google finds http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/cam/green-tea-review, which at least found that it probably wouldn’t make things any worse.