Editorial June 25, 1990 Issue

Good health

Allison W. Phinney, Jr.

Several newspapers in the United States have taken to putting out sizable, twice-yearly magazine supplements called "Good Health." Apparently, reader polls show this is a number one concern. Scarcely a local television station now lacks its resident, kindly but firm, medical authority.

At the same time we're seeing a rapidly growing recognition that people's mental attitudes affect their health. For example, in a recent global analysis of research on risk factors in disease, professors of public health at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that a feeling of lack of control over one's destiny is a powerful factor in disease.

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, wrote in a pamphlet called simply No and Yes: "Good health and a more spiritual religion are the common wants; and these wants have wrought this moral result,—that the so-called mortal mind asks for what Mind alone can supply." She added, "Christian Science is no 'Boston craze;' it is the sober second thought of advancing humanity."^{ No and Yes, pp. 18, 19.}