Options for the treatment of esophageal cancer used to be very limited. Progress in the management of this cancer in the past two decades includes refinement in surgical techniques and perioperative care, better radiological staging methods, enhanced means of planning and delivering radiotherapy, multimodality treatments, and better designs in esophageal prosthesis.A review of literature was conducted to evaluate the different methods of diagnosis of esophageal carcinoma and its implications on the choice of treatment methods whether curative or palliative in an update revision.