A MEDICAL STUDY released a few weeks ago has had us thinking of Shakespeare's words in Hamlet, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

The study looked at healthcare spending and illness rates in the United States and England ("Disease, Disadvantage in the United States and England," Journal of the American Medical Association, May 3, 2006), and found that Americans spend more than twice what the English do on healthcare. And yet, say the report's authors, "Based on self-reported illnesses and biological markers of disease, US residents are much less healthy than their English counterparts."

As sobering as those findings are, it was another factor not addressed by the study that brings to mind Shakespeare's maxim on the power of thought to make things either good or bad. That factor—and it may be the proverbial elephant in the room—is the influence of information. What people think is largely conditioned by what they watch in movies and on television, listen to in radio programming and in conversations with friends and co-workers, and read in print and online.

What we take in mentally, and either accept or fear to be true of ourselves, is often sooner or later what we feel or manifest physically.

Could what people are made to think and believe about themselves actually make them sick? Does taking in information about disease, projected fears of suffering, and mental pictures of symptoms and syndromes—and internalizing thoughts of their suggested consequences—cause the very condition that drugs are designed to treat? Christian Science explains that this is one key way in which aggressive mental influences work: They create and magnify a "demand" through projected fear, suggested vulnerability, and mental imagery, then supply the material remedy to treat it.

In the words of someone who knew better than all others the beneficial power of thinking good thoughts, "You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32). Christ Jesus showed that the source of all good information is God. And what he said immediately before uttering those more famous words is equally powerful: "If you dwell within the revelation I have brought, you are indeed my disciples" (New English Bible). What Jesus revealed, and what Mary Baker Eddy rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century, was that we actually have a wholly good and spiritual existence. That God is Life itself, our Life and the one Mind. That what God creates is good, harmless, and always whole. That the God who is all-good can communicate only His own nature and condition, can impart only goodness to creation. Illnesses are fruits of the human mind's own miscreating—those projected fears that become visible as bodily conditions.

To know, to discern and understand, these basic, yet largely unseen, truths is what makes one free and healthy, and able to help others gain their freedom.

In the compendium of practical, revealed wisdom that was later named the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit" (Matt. 7:17). Corrupt in the original Greek means worthless, bad, or perishable. Bad data, accepted as true, leads to bad outcomes.

Perhaps if those medical researchers had also examined the disparity in what is spent on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs in the US (such advertising is still banned in England), as well as advertising for medical services that play on health anxieties, and disease fund-raising campaigns in the two countries, they might find a similar correlation to overall medical care spending: the greater the expenditure on advertising and promoting illness, the higher the incidence of illness.

Several decades before broadcast media appeared on the world scene, Mary Baker Eddy wrote prophetically: "We should master fear, instead of cultivating it. It was the ignorance of our forefathers in the departments of knowledge now broadcast in the earth, that made them hardier than our trained physiologists, more honest than our sleek politicians" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 197). On the same page, Mrs. Eddy observed that "a new name for an ailment affects people like a Parisian name for a novel garment. Every one hastens to get it."

Mental contagion is the unseen pandemic influence. It is uncovered and disarmed by a people alert to its method, and armed with a deepening understanding of what it means to be spiritually made and maintained. The Christ-message of our God-given health and safety is today's saving grace.

For more on what Mary Baker Eddy wrote about countering mental contagion, see www.spirituality.com/birdflu/