Spiritual Meanings of Illness in Patients with Cervical Cancer

In a health crisis such as diagnosis with cancer and its subsequent treatment, patients may draw on spirituality to attach meanings to the illness. In South Africa, patients' meanings of chronic illness may also be shaped by a specific African religious context. To describe psychological understandings of chronic illness, 16 patients diagnosed with cervical cancer for six months or longer were interviewed at a South African hospital, and the qualitative data were subjected to thematic analysis. This paper reports on spiritual meanings, as one component of these psychological understandings that get attached to living with cervical cancer. For holistic management of cervical cancer patients, and by extension for palliative care, spiritual dimensions should not be neglected; all members of any multi-disciplinary oncology team should be alerted to these dimensions to provide adequate care.