praise and glory to God!

Zach and I visited his dermatologist on Monday. Zach has been receiving treatment for alopecia areata (AA). He was somewhere between the totalis version of the condition (where one loses all hair on one's scalp) and the universalis version (where one loses all of one's body hair).

The "condition" struck quickly late last year-- within two months, taking him from thick/curly hair and long eyelashes to bald with no eyebrows and only his top eyelashes.

We were thankful that AA has no other effects. It's just about hair-- and so, it's only a matter of appearance not physical health. We had also been thankful that the condition had impacted him as an African-American male. For him, being bald is no big deal (relatively speaking) and he looks really good with no hair. (About half of people struck with AA are female.)

AA is an auto-immune condition where the body attacks its own hair. His doctor had prescribed a cream that would "shake up the system" and hopefully, shake the body out of its attack mode. When the doctor described his expectations, we understood him to be optimistic that Zach would get his hair back.

Now, months later, Zach has a full head of hair again. And visiting the doctor on Monday, he expressed amazement at the extent to which the hair had returned. He called it "miraculous". I said that we (and others) had prayed about it a lot, but we had been under the impression that the cure was more medicine than prayer. The doctor said that he thought it was more prayer than medicine.

Well, ok, then!

Thanks to the researchers who found the medicine (the third we tried-- Tazorac) and to the doctor who had the knowledge to prescribe it. But praise to the God who equips researchers and doctors-- and who brings healing directly as the Great Physician!