JPSIM Journal of Pakistan Society of Internal Medicine J Pak Soc Intern Med 2709-8729 2710-0804 Pakistan Society of Internal Medicine 10.70302/jpsim.v4i4.2365 jpsim.v4i4.2365 Case Report Dilemma of Patients who Attend to Spiritual Healers Munir Muhammad Kashif munir.gemini81@gmail.com * Rehman Sana Hanif Asif HRI-NIH TB Research Center King Edward Medical University Lahore, *Correspondence: Muhammad Kashif Munir (munir.gemini81@gmail.com) 29 11 2023 2023 4 4 321 323 22 08 2023 12 09 2023 Copyright © 2023 The Author(s) 2023 The Author(s) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

: Gastric cancer which remains the sixth most prevalent cancer affecting millions of people each year around the globe. People find alternative therapies after being diagnosed with certain diseases including spiritual healers. Present case study was of a 49 years old woman diagnosed early with stage 1 of gastric carcinoma, she did not agreed for gastrectomy and started to attend a spiritual healer for treatment. Her disease shifted to stage IV gastric cancer within a year and she is on death bed after having stomach bypass surgery now. Although there are chances of survival for more than five years among patients opted for gastrectomy in an early stage but no data exists in case of spiritual healing. Education and awareness are the basic tools to make the people vigilant about the disease, diagnosis, cure and survival where proper medication can save many lives. There must be a policy to closely monitor the spiritual healers and a record must be established to see the number of patients with different cancers attend them with final outcomes.

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