People sometimes get hurt in the business of living. The human body is subject to disease, injuries and various mishaps of accidental or intentional character.
Throughout the ages, religions have attempted to relieve man’s physical suffering. Methods have ranged from prayer to the laying on of hands, and many superstitions arose to account for their occasional effectiveness. It has been a commonly held belief, however, no matter the method used, that the spirit can have an effect on the body.

Today, medicine treats the body when there is something wrong with it. But it overlooks almost totally the relationship of the spiritual being to his body and the effect the former has on the latter.

The fact is, after any necessary medical treatment, the individual himself has an enormous capacity to influence the body and its well-being or lack of it.

L. Ron Hubbard developed numerous applications of his discoveries for the mental and spiritual aspects of a person’s physical difficulties. And as more and more techniques evolved, a new body of technology came into use, called “Assists.”

The ways assists can be applied are almost limitless. They always help and often have miraculous results. Dozens of assists exist today for a wide array of conditions.

In Scientology an assist is an action undertaken to help a person confront physical difficulties. If a child has fallen and hurt himself, an assist can help him overcome the trauma. If a person has a toothache or has had a tooth pulled, an assist can help relieve the pain. When people are ill, assists can ease the discomfort and speed recovery. Even broken bones respond to assists. These and many other conditions can be improved by application of procedures classified under this heading of “Assists.”

An assist, then, can be described as a Scientology process which is done to alleviate a present time discomfort. A process is an exact series of directions or sequence of actions taken to accomplish a desired result. There are many processes contained in the materials of Scientology, but assists make up a class of processes in themselves.

All Scientology processes address and handle a wide range of conditions affecting the spirit, the being himself.

The spirit in Scientology is called the thetan, by which is meant the person himself — not his body or his name, the physical universe, his mind or anything else — it is that which is aware of being aware; the identity which is the individual. The term thetan was coined to eliminate any possible confusion with older, invalid concepts. It comes from the Greek letter theta which the Greeks used to represent thought or perhaps spirit, to which an n is added to make a noun in the modern style used to create words in engineering.

Probably the greatest discovery of Scientology and its most forceful contribution to the knowledge of mankind has been the isolation, description and handling of the human spirit. In Scientology it can be demonstrated that that thing which is the person, the personality, is separable from the body and the mind at will and without causing bodily death or mental derangement.

In ages past there has been considerable controversy concerning the human spirit or soul, and various attempts to control man have been effective in view of his almost complete ignorance of his own identity. As you know that you are where you are at this moment, so you would know if you, a spirit, were detached from your mind and body. Man had not discovered this before because, lacking the technologies of Scientology, he had very little reality upon his detachment from his mind and body; therefore, he conceived himself to be at least in part a mind and a body. The entire cult of communism was based upon the fact that one lives only one life, that there is no hereafter and that the individual has no religious significance. Man at large has been close to this state for at least the last century. The state is of a very low order, excluding as it does all self-recognition.

The thetan (spirit) is described in Scientology as having no mass, no wavelength, no energy and no time or location in space except by consideration or postulate. (A postulate, simply put, is a decision that something will happen.)

The spirit, then, is not a thing. It is the creator of things.

By spiritual means, but means which are as precise as mathematics, a host of bad conditions of life may be remedied in Scientology. Illness and malfunction can be divided into two general classes. First, those resulting from the operation of the spirit directly upon the communication networks of life or the body and, second, those occasioned by the disruption of structure through purely physical causes.

The term psychosomatic means the mind making the body ill or illnesses which have been created physically within the body by derangement of the mind. Psycho refers to mind and somatic refers to body.

Il est possible de démontrer qu’une personne n’est pas son corps, mais est en réalité un être spirituel, appelé Thétan en Scientologie.

Unhappiness, inability to heal and psychosomatic illnesses (which include some 70 percent of the illnesses of man) are best handled by immediate address of the thetan. Illnesses caused by recognizable bacteria and injury in accident are best treated by physical means. These fall distinctly into the field of medicine and are not the province of Scientology, even though accidents and illness and bacterial infection are predetermined in almost all cases by spiritual malfunction and unrest. And conditions in accidents are definitely prolonged by any spiritual malfunction.

Thus we have the field of medicine addressing the immediate injury, such surgical matters as birth and acute infection, and such things as bruises and scrapes resulting from accidents, as well as the administration of drugs and antibiotics to prevent the demise of the patient in a crisis. This is the role of medicine.

Where tendency to disease or injury exists, or where disease or injury is being prolonged, or where unhappiness and worry causes mental or physical upset, we are dealing in the realm of Scientology. For such things are best healed, or best prevented, or best remedied by immediate and direct recourse to the thetan and its action on the body.

The only truly therapeutic agent in this universe is the spirit. In Scientology this has been demonstrated with more thoroughness and exists with more certainty than the physical sciences or mathematics. A Scientologist can help make an individual well and happy simply by addressing the human spirit.

Injuries, operations, delivery of babies, severe illnesses and periods of intense emotional shock all deserve to be handled with thorough and complete assists.

An assist in no way intrudes upon the role of medicine. Medical examination and diagnosis should be sought where needed, and where treatment is routinely successful, medical treatment should be obtained. As an assist can at times cover up an actual injury or broken bone, no chances should be taken, especially if the condition does not easily respond. In other words, where something is merely thought to be a slight sprain, to be on the safe side an x-ray should be obtained, particularly if it does not at once respond. An assist is not a substitute for medical treatment and does not attempt to cure injuries requiring medical aid, but is complementary (adds) to it. It is even doubtful if full healing can be accomplished by medical treatment alone and it is certain that an assist greatly speeds recovery. In short, one should realize that physical healing does not take into account the being and the repercussion on the spiritual existence of the person.

Injury and illness are predisposed (made more likely to occur) by the spiritual state of the person. They are precipitated (brought on) by the being himself as a manifestation of his current spiritual condition. And they are prolonged (extended in time beyond normal limits) by any failure to fully handle the spiritual factors associated with them.

The causes of predisposition, precipitation and prolongation are addressed with assists.

Certainly life is not very tolerable to a person who has been injured or ill, to a woman who has just delivered a baby, to a person who has just suffered a heavy emotional shock. And there is no reason a person should remain in such a low state, particularly for weeks, months or years, when he or she could be remarkably assisted to recover in hours, days or weeks.

It is in fact a sort of practiced cruelty to insist by neglect that a person continue on in such a state when one can learn and practice and obtain relief for such a person.

One does not have to be a medical doctor to take someone to a medical doctor. And one does not have to be a medical doctor to observe that medical treatment may not be helping the patient. And one does not have to be a medical doctor to handle things caused spiritually by the being himself.

Just as there are two sides to healing — the spiritual and the structural or physical — there are also two states that can be spiritually attained. The first of these states might be classified as “humanly tolerable.” Assists come under this heading. The second is “spiritually improved.”

Any minister (and this has been true as long as there has been a subject called religion) is bound to relieve his fellow being of anguish. There are many ways a minister can do this.

An assist is not engaging in healing. It is certainly not engaging in treatment. What it is doing is assisting the individual to heal himself or be healed by another agency by removing his reasons for precipitating and prolonging his condition and lessening his predisposition to further injure himself or remain in an intolerable condition.

This is entirely outside the field of “healing” as envisioned by the medical doctor and by actual records of results is very, very far beyond the capability of psychology, psychiatry and “mental treatment” as practiced in those fields.

In short, the assist is strictly and entirely in the field of the spirit and is the traditional province of religion, though not restricted to religion only.

A person applying Assist Technology should realize the power which lies in his hands and his potential skills when trained. He has this to give in the presence of suffering: he can make life tolerable. He can also shorten a term of recovery and may even make recovery possible when it might not be otherwise.