A Harvard research fellow has touched off a medical debate by analyzing how Steve Jobs could have survived his cancer.

In a detailed post on the Quora.com website, Ramzi Amri, blamed alternative treatments and a deadly long delay for allowing Jobs’ neuroendocrine tumour to grow out of control. Jobs died of the neuroendocrine variety of pancreatic cancer earlier this month. He was 56.

“Mr. Jobs always was a free thinker, a strong believer in spirituality, a vegetarian and a known skeptic of conventional medicine. He chose to reject conventional medicine altogether for a while,” wrote Amri in what he specified was his own speculation based on his 1.5 years of colon cancer research.

“It's always an ethical puzzle if a patient chooses alternative treatment that we know from fact will not work. Sadly badly treated cancer is just as deadly for him as for anyone else.”

Amri faced some congratulations and some sharp criticism for his attempt.

Oncologist Adam Brufsky tried to rebut Amri with his own Jobs’ diagnosis based on photographs over time and bits and pieces of information.

Brufsky contended the Apple founder did receive chemotherapy after his 2009 liver transplant and Jobs “outlived the median survival by a few years.”

“Whether he used alternative therapies or not had absolutely no effect on his survival or outcome,” Brufsky said. “That was dictated from day one by his tumour and its biology, and our lack of effective therapies for this condition.”

Amri isn’t the only young researcher using his studies to try to explain the death of a seminal figure to his generation.

David Gorski, an oncologist and controversial medical blogger who calls himself an “Apple fan-boy,” produced his own graphic-heavy analysis this week on Science-Based Medicine. org.

“His delay in treatment (might have) contributed to his ultimate demise. We don’t know that it did, which is one reason why we have to be very, very careful not to overstate the case.”