I feel it isn’t fair to leave MICRDICK on the firing line alone, but I’ve been around these boards long enough to know that almost anything I post about my faith will be dismissed as “fairy stories”.
I have been a practicing Christian Scientist, with varying levels of commitment and activity in church for just about 30 years. My mother rejected the religion, but her parents, and two older generations of my family have practiced Christian Science.
I go to dentists, started wearing glasses last year, and have seen physicians for conditions that weren’t responding to my own prayer in a way that I found acceptable. The important thing to know is that, as far as the church “rules” go, each individual is responsible only to himself. A member who chooses to see a doctor is not shunned, excommunicated, or in any way censured. That is not to say there won’t be someone at church who will wrinkle her nose at me if I show up with a cast on.
I personally have had healings of a number of things that were never medically diagnosed including cold type symptoms, something that I suspect (based on discussing my experience with my sister, who is not a Christian Scientist) was kidney stones, and very quick relief of pain from assorted injuries.
My son was healed in the span of time between waking up and time to get on the school bus of pink-eye. He’s had any number of healings. He also asked one time when he injured his foot (sprain, not wound) to see a doctor. I didn’t hesitate to take him. He’s old enough to make his own choice. She told us it was sprained, not broken. She wrote him a note for two weeks excused from participating in gym, and said he should be careful of it until if felt normal. He was back on his skateboard a day later assuring me that it felt perfectly fine.
Early in the history of Christian Science a larger percentage of the accounts of healings published were of things that had been medically diagnosed because the religion was new and a lot of people turned to it when doctors gave them no hope. (That’s how my own family found it.) Many people raised in the religion have never had any call to see a doctor. My grandmother never did. My grandfather described himself as having been a sickly kid, with diagnosed asthma. Two of his aunts (it always seems to be aunts…) had become interested in the religion and urged his mother to call a CS Practitioner. He was healed of the asthma, and practiced the religion for the rest of his life.
There are published accounts of more current healings of medically diagnosed conditions. They are often in cases where someone has become ill or injured in some public place and is taken by ambulance to a hospital. Some people from there release themselves against medical advice. Not everyone does, though. What we often hear in these accounts is "The doctor looked at the second set of x-rays and told me he has never seen [insert name of condition or type of injury] healed so quickly.
As to robert_columbia’s direct questions, Did it work? Did it fail? I believe wholeheartedly that reliance on a pure understanding of what the Bible teaches, which is the basis of Christian Science absolutely works. In the cases where I haven’t been healed I have never thought “Christian Science didn’t work this time.” It takes (I believe) a tremendous commitment to practice Christian Science, and as I admitted in my second paragraph, my level of commitment waivers. That is typically in direct proportion to how many plates I’m trying to keep spinning at once. The times in my life when I’ve felt the most happy, healthy and productive have been the times when I’ve been the most devoted to studying the Bible, and the Christian Science textbook.