While it's agreed that placebos are not a universal panacea, placebo research leads us to think about the relevance of mind-power and how much influence thought actually has on our health.
Reasoning from a more spiritual perspective, author Mary Baker Eddy, reached a similar conclusion, explaining in her key text on prayer-based healing that pain is always a mental image or state.
"… the human mind is all that can produce pain," she wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
Advertisement
Her explanations, showing the influence of negative thoughts such as fear echo Biblical texts such as the words of King David, written in 900 BCE: "A grievous vision is declared unto me … therefore are my loins filled with pain:" (Psalms)
But can pain really be relieved just by thinking differently?
Yes, but in my experience I have found that it needs more than just positive thinking to free us from pain.
So, back to my stay in hospital. In my late-teens I was "on fire" with enthusiasm about a couple of unique books which I had recently revisited. They answered so many of the questions I had about why we are here and whether what our senses perceive is all there is to existence.
The Bible, so comforting to so many people, didn't seem all that relevant to me until I started earnestly reading Science and Health, which brings out its spiritual meaning and explains how and why not only Jesus, but also his early disciples and many of the Old Testament prophets, were able to heal all kinds of physical needs.
I learned that there was a spiritual science in place based on a divine consciousness of being, and I'd had some modest success in applying it. For instance, a toothache had vanished as I had caught a glimpse of my real nature as expressing divine Spirit, rather than just matter.
Advertisement
I was deeply grateful for the nurses and doctors who provided their superb skill and loving care through a more physically based science. Yet, lying there in oblivion between doses of painkillers just wasn't cutting it for me anymore.
My studies had shown the importance of addressing the spiritual need as an aid to recovery, a standpoint now supported by medical research.
I started reading the thought-changing book again right there in hospital, and called a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me by helping me to understand more consistently my real, spiritual nature.
Discuss in our Forums
See what other readers are saying about this article!
Click here to read & post comments.