Paloma Shemirani: Brother recounts moment he found out his twin sister died after rejecting cancer treatment

The twin brother of a young woman who died of a preventable cancer after choosing to have coffee enemas instead of conventional treatment has recalled the moment he found out she had died.

Gabriel Shemirani says his sister Paloma was pressured to reject conventional treatment for her disease by their medical conspiracy theorist mother and father and he blames them for her death.

Instead, they convinced her to try an unproven “alternative treatment program” — once promoted by cancer conwoman Belle Gibson — which involved repeated coffee enemas about five times a day to “cleanse toxins” from her body.

Paloma, a 23-year-old Cambridge graduate, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and died in the Royal Sussex County Hospital on July 24 in 2024.

The actions of her mother Kay ‘Kate’ Shemirani, a disgraced former NHS nurse and rabid anti-vaxxer, is being scrutinised by an inquest into Paloma’s death by the Kent and Medways Coroners Court.

Gabriel has been campaigning to have his parents held to account and is pushing for legal changes to protect patients from medical misinformation.

“I couldn’t save my sister, but there’s still time to save others,” he told The Sun.

“People are dying. This needs to stop.”

“The law is so out of date, that we can have a woman that’s killed her daughter still claiming to be a nurse.

“I believe my sister was being coerced. It’s conspiratorial coercion when you convince her the elites are going to kill them, big pharma’s going to kill them, even the doctors at the hospital are going to kill them.”

Kay Shemirani was struck off by the Nursing and Midwifery Council in 2021 after peddling COVID conspiracies that “put the public at a significant risk of harm” and has been banned across multiple social media platforms.

She was reinstated on X after Elon Musk took over.

Kate denies she is to blame for Paloma’s death and claims instead that she was a victim of medical negligence.

Kate and her ex-husband, Paloma’s father Faramarz Shemirani, told the BBC in June they had evidence “Paloma died as a result of medical interventions given without confirmed diagnosis or lawful consent” but that has not been substantiated.

In written statements, Paloma had expressed fear of undergoing chemotherapy, worried it could affect her fertility and questioned whether she even had cancer.

With treatment, the five year survival rate for patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma is about 75 per cent.

Gabriel says the last time he saw his twin was on on Christmas Day in 2023, when he wasn’t able to have a meaningful conversation because she was “out of it”.

He was then blocked from visiting her and instead resorted to sending messages begging her to get treatment.

While Paloma was still alive, in April 2024, Gabriel brought a High Court case to assess his sister‘s ability to make medical decisions while living with her mother, he had also previously raised his concerns with social services.

Nick Gosset, an osteopath giving evidence at the inquest, said in 43 years in medicine he “had never seen anything like” the amount of cancerous growths that spread from her right shoulder to her neck.

He had examined her on July 19 after she collapsed at home. She died in hospital five days later.

Gabriel only found out Paloma had passed away when he was told by a friend six days later that she had died choking on her tumours. And, neither he or his brother were told of her funeral.

“That’s the most difficult part, because you’re trying to do everything in your brain to think it’s not real, it’s not true, he told the Sun.

“And every time you utter the words to someone else, that ‘Paloma is dead’ it feels like you’re being burned alive.”

The inquest is due to resume next week.