The study aimed to explore the attitudes and perceptions of faith healing users in Benue state, Nigeria. This has become necessary because spiritual healing practice may be a crucial area but remains neglected within the health care literature. The main objective of the study is to look at the issues such as time of use, the attitude of the user towards spiritual healers, effectiveness, and challenges of spiritual healing. This is borne out of the desire that in an age when bio-western medicine is touted as the cure for many diseases, understanding how and why individuals seek alternative treatment, specifically spiritual cure services may help to develop more effective health care interventions. We employed an exploratory study design of a purely qualitative research approach involving 100 randomly selected participants to urge a maximum variation of experiences and opinions on the time of consultation, perceived effectiveness, and challenges of spiritual healing practices in Benue state, Nigeria. In-depth interviews were conducted from 15th October 2020 to 25th January 2021. Data were thematically analysed and presented using the posteriori inductive reduction approach. The main findings were that spiritual healers served as the first port of callin disease treatment and prevention. Patient perceived their health status to be good and improved after utilising spiritual healers. However, users faced challenges like stigmatisation and victimisation in seeking health care as well as fake spiritual healers parading around. This study has offered baseline evidence to this important area of inquiry that has been neglected within the scholarly discourse in Benue state, Nigeria.
Spiritual healing, alternative health care, health care delivery, Benue State, Nigeria
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