You understand that Christian Scientists rely on prayer for healing. But you've also heard something about Christian Science treatment. You wonder how treatment is different from prayer.

Actually, this kind of treatment is a form of prayer. It proceeds from the fact that God is supremely good and that He doesn't create, nor do His laws sustain, disease and evil. A Christian Scientist who is "treating" illness, for example, is making the effort to acknowledge strongly, and as fully as he possibly can, God's all-presence and goodness. Prayer takes a variety of forms—from petition (simply asking God for His help, for example) to using a prayer that has been familiar from childhood—but Christian Science treatment is the persistent application of spiritual truths to a situation in order to bring healing.

According to Christian Science, illness, along with the other discords of life, is, at bottom, the result of the ignorance, fear, or sin of the human mind. The most basic medicine is therefore not the concoction of a drug or highly refined matter but is the divine Mind and its healing influence. As Christian Scientists view it, this understanding of an infinite, present, and totally good God is the means by which Christ Jesus healed. And as Paul encouraged all Christians to do, the Christian Scientist is striving to have that Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus." ^{Phil. 2:5.}

The theology of Christian Science emphasizes again and again the necessity for a deep love and thoroughgoing Christianity in order to treat and to heal in this Christianly scientific way. So there is far more to treatment than its just being a different, and perhaps less costly, kind of "New Age" alternative medicine. The person who would treat effectively in accordance with the Science of Christianity must face up to the deep-seated resistance to the allness of God, divine Mind, that seems to be so much a part of believing oneself to be a mortal separated from God. This victory isn't won halfheartedly, and it surely doesn't come all at once.

What gives treatment its capacity to heal is an awakened understanding that God, Spirit or Mind, really is all-powerful good and that the opposite of God isn't substantial. The spiritual and scientific fact is that God has never created anything less than good, and He is holding His loved child in wholeness and health, in His image.

To treat disease or some other circumstance involves yielding thought to what divine Mind is knowing and giving. The medicine of spiritual treatment is the inspiring truth of God's total goodness and power here with us to an extent beyond anything we might have hoped or imagined.

Until someone has experienced the effect of Christian Science treatment, it might seem a little hard to believe. But the accounts of healing in this magazine each week and the more-than-a-century record of healing, beginning with the one-hundred-page chapter of testimony in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy and a similar chapter in her Miscellaneous Writings, are those of calm, responsible people. Mrs. Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, describes the basis of such healing succinctly when she writes, "Science depicts disease as error, as matter versus Mind, and error reversed as subserving the facts of health." ^{Science and Health, p. 319.}

Treatment is always a form of prayer, yet not all prayer would be treatment. During a church service, for example, I would pray for the congregation but would not treat them. I would pray for a friend under medical care in the hospital, but would not treat him or her.

The reasoning behind the position is this. Christian Science treatment is expected to bring change for the better to an individual's state of thought for the purpose of healing. It has a strong, definite effect on the person. Therefore it can't be undertaken without the person's knowledge and request. And just as you wouldn't use two systems of psychology or two different medical treatments for the same problem in one individual because they would interfere with each other, so you wouldn't mix Christian Science treatment with medicine. The intent might be kindly enough, but in the end the effect wouldn't be beneficial.

Over the last hundred years evidence has been accumulating to show that what people believe has an enormous effect on their bodies. Many objective scientific studies, from those on the healing rate after retinal detachment ^{See Robert B. Reeves, Jr., "Healing and Salvation: Some Research and Its Implications," Union Theological Seminary Quarterly, Winter, 1969, pp. 187-197.} to the placebo effect on stomach functions, ^{See Richard M. Restak, M.D., The Mind (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 160.} to mention just two out of hundreds, have shown that what the human mind thinks, matters a great deal.

Christian Science explains further that not only is this so but that neither sick nor well matter itself is truly substance; it is an extension of human belief and thought. So even when the "cause" of disease is viral or genetic or some other supposedly material mechanism, its basic source is the error of believing that God, Spirit, is less than All. And the healing truth is that God is the great and only real cause in our lives. This is the releasing, liberating realization at the heart of all Christian Science treatment.

Allison W. Phinney, Jr.