Testimonies

How do you know if your doctor is a quack? This is the position I'm in at the moment. The plot (not the hair) thickens, as I make one last stab at finding out why my head sheds more than the kindly hundred hairs a day.

A few years ago my friend Barbara's daughter was suddenly losing her mane by handfuls. Barbara is not only a mother but a hairdresser, and it freaked her out. She tried the AMA route and there were no answers. Desperate, she went to Dr. B. He asked if her girl had started wearing underarm deodorant.

As a matter of fact she had. Her 5th grade teacher, offended by an aroma of some prematurely pungent pupil, had announced that the whole class was going to CVS for homework. At Dr. B's recommendation, Barbara's daughter discontinued the deodorant containing aluminum chlorohydrate, which he said clogs the pores that are meant to expel the body's toxins. The hair grew back. (My own daughter isn't sold. Having evidently made a Faustian trade-off of cancer for short-term aroma appeal, she wrote on my shopping list: "deodorant-cancerous kind.")

Dr. B. has some very strange diagnostic practices in his office, which I don't see any scientific basis for. But I go along with it because of the testimonies-not only the hair story, but also the time he righted Barbara's intractable hip problem by adjusting her ankle, when the cultural high priests of medicine had been unable. Barbara later commented to her skeptical physician: "All I know is I had pain in my hip and now I don't."

I was struck by a parallel-Peter's comment to Jesus when the Great Physician asked if the Apostle would leave him too, like the crowds who thought Jesus' ways bizarre: "To whom else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68). Testimonies engender confidence. The proof is in the pudding, always.