Article December 12, 1994 Issue

The primacy of consciousness in treating disease

Miles Harbur

If you use medicines—or ever have—you may have wondered why a particular treatment or prescription seems to work for a while, but then its effects seem to diminish. Or why a particular medicine appears to help some people but not others. I wondered about this question for many years. I remember that when I was a teenager, I had pretty bad acne. The first treatment recommended to me was to wash my face with a special soap. I tried several of these, and each seemed to work for a few weeks or months. There was always a period in which I got really hopeful, because my face would begin to clear up, but soon the acne got worse again. At my doctor's recommendation, I even tried covering my face with mashed bananas; it actually had an effect for a few days! Antibiotics had a longer but not a lasting effect.

During my last year in high school, another phenomenon of medicinal remedies became clear to me. When I began to suffer momentary blackouts and loss of consciousness during football practice, our family doctor said that my blood pressure was dangerously high. Exploratory surgery was performed to try to determine the cause of the problem, and I had to take blood pressure medication every day. This treatment helped temporarily, and I was able to begin playing football again about two months later. I stopped taking the drugs after a few months, however, because they had side effects; they made me feel drowsy and rather listless. A physical at college the next year showed that my blood pressure was still abnormally high. I was told that I would have to start taking medication again and that I would probably need to do so every day for the rest of my life to avoid heart disease. It seemed to me, once again, that physical remedies were not of lasting help to me, nor were they consistent or dependable in their effects.

While at college, I became a student of Christian Science. Through the practice of this religion, I've learned that for healing to be permanent, its primary aim must be to change the consciousness of the patient, not to alter physically the tissues or chemistry of the body. In the textbook of Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes: "The prescription which succeeds in one instance fails in another, and this is owing to the different mental states of the patient. These states are not comprehended, and they are left without explanation except in Christian Science" (p. 149).