Supporting Muslim Patients During Advanced Illness

Abstract

Religion is an important part of many patients' cultural perspectives and value systems that influence them during advanced illness and toward the end of life when they directly face mortality. Worldwide violence perpetrated by people identifying as Muslim has been a growing fear for people living in the US and elsewhere. This fear has further increased by the tense rhetoric heard from the recent US presidential campaign and the new presidential administration. For many, this includes fear of all Muslims, the second-largest religious group in the world with 1.6 billion adherents and approximately 3.5 million in the US alone. Patient-centered care requires health professionals to look past news headlines and unchecked social media so they can deliver high-quality care to all patients. This article explores areas of importance in the context of advanced illness for practitioners of Islam. These include the conditions needed for prayer, the roles of medical treatment and religious authority, the importance of modesty, the religious concordance of clinicians, the role of family in medical decision making, advance care planning, and pain and symptom management. Initial recommendations to optimize care for Muslim patients and their families, informed by the described tenets of Muslim faith, are provided for clinicians and health systems administrators. These include Islamic cultural awareness training for staff, assessment of patients and families to determine needs, health education and decision-making outreach, and community health partnerships with local Islamic institutions.

Psychometric Properties of the Arabic Version of the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illnesses Therapy–Fatigue in Arabic Cancer Patients

“…This may be explained as crossculturally problematic as the word ''coping'' translated into Arabic terms is ''Takuble.'' In Islamic culture, Muslims' religious beliefs dictate that the disease or illness is God's will 30 ; consequently, Muslims should cope with illness without regard to satisfaction. Another possible explanation was that GE2 is the only positively worded item among five items which were negatively worded.…”

Muslim female gender preference in delaying the medical care at emergency department in Qassim Region, Saudi Arabia

“…In Islam, cross-gender modesty involves the physical covering of the body as a self and Allah respect[9] men and women both required to show modesty in their dress, but women modesty in Islamic culture is more sensitive and iconic[10] begin separated from other gender are a form of modesty too, however, a patient's requirement of preference for physician may reflect culture, religion, or simply personal preference. [11] However, religious have the most influence on Muslim behavior, including refusing health-care seek from an opposite-sex physician even in the ED, where the cases often are time-sensitive. As it is universally acknowledged that patients and their families have the right to decide the gender of their health care providers.…”

Relationship between the religious attitudes of women with gynecologic cancer and mental adjustment to cancer

“…Islam encourages receiving treatment in case of illness. Muslims are asked to keep praying and fighting with the disease (Al-Shahri, 2016; Boucher et al, 2017; Albayrak et al, 2019; Sharif and Ong, 2019). The qualitative study by Ahaddour and Broeckaert (2018) reported that religious approaches of Muslim women who were diagnosed with cancer such as thinking of the disease as a condition from God affected patients positively on coping with the problems caused by the disease (Ahaddour and Broeckaert, 2018).…”