A Christian Science practitioner is what the tradition has instead of clergy at the bedside: a member who has made healing through prayer a full-time public ministry. The work is called treatment, and it is entirely mental and prayerful; the practitioner neither examines nor medicates, but prays from the standpoint the textbook teaches, that God is wholly good and that disease has no standing in spiritual reality, seeking the change of thought that Christian Science holds to be the substance of healing. Patients telephone or visit, may be members of any church or none, and pay a modest fee for the period of treatment, an arrangement the movement has kept deliberately professional since Mary Baker Eddy's day.
The path into the work runs through class instruction: Primary class, taught by an authorized teacher over roughly two weeks on the chapter of Science and Health called Recapitulation, equips a student to practice, and those who devote themselves to the ministry full time may apply for listing in The Christian Science Journal, the directory the church has published since the nineteenth century. Journal listing is the profession's credential, carrying the church's attestation that the practitioner is in good standing and available to the public. Alongside the practitioners stand Christian Science nurses, who give practical, non-medical care to those relying on treatment, a distinct role with its own Manual authorization and its own Journal listings.