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.