Secondly, mind-cure sects appealed to a new class emerging in America, as, for the first time, large numbers of people no longer were forced into long-hour, hard physical labor jobs. This emerging middle-class had time to develop psychosomatic diseases that readily lent themselves to mental healing techniques. The pressures of a rapidly changing urban American society created fears, phobias, and other emotional illnesses which traditional medicine neither understood nor could treat, so this new group of �sick� people in the U.S. eagerly turned to the mind?cure religions for answers, just as many people today who face too much stress turn to meditation and other self-control techniques for help.

Finally, the 19th century traditional medical view of women and their physical and emotional problems provided a large audience of disillusioned women for the mind-cure approach to health care.