Losing my religion. Or not.

I've heard stories from people who have lost their faith. You've probably seen it happen: they successfully defend themselves for years, deflect all attacks, shun all unbelievers, and then one day they accidentally get a good look at the man behind the curtain and are completely at sea for as long as it takes them to construct a life that makes sense without whatever it was they had built their lives on: their church, their crazy family, or a certain political party. A particular dietary or health care regimen, maybe, or even an educational theory.

Sometimes they lean too hard in the opposite, equally wacky -- sometimes even wackier -- direction.

It's always been hard for me to understand all this. Faith in something, in the first place, especially unquestioned faith. But also I can't understand why it's so hard to let go of an idea once it's proved to be false or inadequate. I guess I'm way more attached to being right than I am able to sustain a particular belief. Most of the time. I guess you could say I have a very hard time letting go of my disbeliefs.

But also, and maybe more usefully, I can accept that sometimes things happen that we don't quite get. We think they are the result of our efforts, but maybe they are just accidents. Or we were messing around with something we don't understand. I certainly don't believe that we know everything -- not about medicine, not about physics, not about UFO propulsion. Surely, though, the truth is out there.

Here is a case in point -- a story of a serious blow to my habitual (and I happen to think, very healthy) skepticism.

This really did happen to me personally, and not to someone who knows someone who is related to a friend's neighbor. It's not earth-shattering by any means, but I have never been able to reconcile what happened with what I believe. Or more to the point, maybe -- with what I don't believe. And I've been reluctant to try to prove it didn't happen, partly because -- well, you'll see.

I really don't want to turn into a wacko.

The backstory: Since childhood I have experienced intermittent and occasionally extremely severe joint pain -- from the usual aches and pains in the joints of an active kid to the feeling that some alien force had injected every single joint in my body with some kind of gritty, hot, glowing, radioactive, sticky goo. Green, smelly sludge from the bottom of a radioactive pond.

There was laboratory evidence that something was going on, but not enough to say exactly what it was, and I tried a zillion analgesic & anti-inflammatory drugs (not especially helpful), special exercises (helpful in a preventive way), a kind of makeshift self-hypnosis/ attitude adjustment/ tough-it-out strategy (very useful for a lot of things), and excessive drinking (you can guess how that turned out).

I learned not to talk about it with certain types of people. You've met them. They have some kind of supplement for sale, or their cousin sells it. Or they are Deeply Suspicious of the Medical Establishment that is trying to minimize the legitimate suffering of all womyn -- or they were the ones who caused it in the first place with all those so-called "tests." Or maybe I have a gluten allergy, or lactose intolerance, or it's my paralyzing fear of intimacy making my joints lock up like that.

Whatever.

So here's what happened: In my late 20s/early 30s I went to a physical therapist who specialized in sports medicine for a recurring problem originally due to weight-lifting injury. She was very helpful and competent and seemed very mainstream, but given occasionally to include some stuff I found a little too, you know. Wooey-wooey. I can't remember what-all it was called, but it was harmless enough & didn't take time away from the good work she did.

We eventually became friends, as it was a pretty small town and we traveled in the same circles. At some point during the treatment sessions I had told her about the joint pain history, and one day she noticed I was in a lot of pain and was preparing to leave for a camping trip in a couple of weeks.

"I think you should see Mr. X," she said one day, out of nowhere. "He's a homeopath. I know he can help you."

"I've read about that," I said. "I'll probably be feeling OK in a few days. I'll just bring a bunch of little bottles of gin in case it gets too bad on the trip. Or maybe some weed. Less garbage to carry back out. I just don't think homeopathy is good for this kind of thing."

She said I was too skeptical for my own good, but that she guessed maybe I didn't want to live without my pain for some (presumably dysfunctional) reason. She'd seen cases like mine before, she said, but dropped the subject to invite us over for dinner the night before we left.

We got there, and of course you know she had tricked me. There was Mr. X sitting at the table. I looked at my lovely ex-wife and she looked at me. We realized at exactly the same time who this guy was, and we had to try really hard not to laugh.

See, we both worked for media outlets, such as they were, in this tiny little town, and we got a lot of letters. From weirdos, mostly. Mr. X was a repeat offender. His letters came in the mail or were stuffed under the doors of our offices when we were out. They were written in the requisite CRAZYPERSONALLCAPS printing, no margins or spacing, with a blunt pencil or a series of magic markers (which would inevitably dry out within a few lines and he'd switch to another one) on the back of truck-stop placemats or data printouts taken, we'd determined, from the recycling bin in the office at a nearby community college.

Turns out he taught physics there.

But his real work was trying to modify the flying saucer technology he'd seen either during an alien abduction or a more consensual visit with aliens or occasionally the story was that one had crashed on his farm & he'd had the flying saucer wreckage in his barn until the CIA or the NSA or someone from the government had stolen it, but not before he'd figured out how to modify his old Pinto's carbuerator based on the saucer propulsion technology he'd seen, and his old Pinto would get like 150 miles per gallon but as soon as he finished building it and testing it the damn CIA would steal it. Again.

Another sideline, as I soon found, was homeopathy. He hadn't mentioned this in any of the letters. I gathered that someone had successfully treated him with a homeopathic remedy for something and then asked him, since he was a physicist & all, could he explain how it worked? He'd never heard of homeopathy before, and wondered what it had to do with physics. His friend explained that the pills in each remedy were basically just sugar pills that had been dipped into a solution containing not a particular substance dissolved in alcohol, but rather the diluted "vibrational signature" of a particular substance dissolved in alcohol. Serial dilutions meant that no detectable trace of the original substance remained in the solution that would be administered to the patient. With each successive dilution, the "remedy," as it's called, became stronger, apparently.

The vibrational signature or whatever was related somehow to quantum physics, and the friend wanted to know was that maybe like the rotational energy of the atoms in the whateverthehell.

Mr. X pronounced it bunk and went back to his flying saucer project, but he got kind of worked up about these "vibrational signatures," taking the whole concept of homeopathy as an affront to the purity and virtue and essential nobility of quantum physics. So he set out to prove that homeopathy did not -- could not possibly in fact -- work, even though it had worked perfectly well for him.

The trouble was, though, that the more he tried to debunk it, the more obvious it became to him that it really worked. No, really. He was going to write a book about it just as soon as he finished the carbuerator modification in the latest of what seemed to be an endless supply of Ford Pintos, provided the CIA didn't steal this one too.

He needed the money from the invention in order to build the right labs & so on; he still hadn't figured out exactly how it worked. And he needed time to write.

I was at kind of a loss. The guy seriously creeped me out, but not to the point where I wanted to embarrass my friend or refuse her hospitality. Plus I was certain that even if homeopathy were totally legit, this guy was a wacko. I figured I could make an appointment and then cancel it later.

No such luck. He was going to cure me before dinner.

He got out a little case of tiny pill bottles and an enormous reference book and I noticed a large supply of decrepit felt tip pens in his pocket protector.

He started flipping through the book and asking me unrelated and increasingly bizarre questions and noting my answers, or noting something anyway, on little scraps of paper which he'd use to mark the page in the book but I never saw him go back and look at anything he'd written.

He licked the tip of the pen every time he started writing.

Finally he chose a little pill bottle and told me that, despite what I may have heard from other practitioners (ahem), one dose would work, and it would work instantaneously. If it was the right remedy, that is. He assured me it was fine if I didn't believe in it. He didn't either, he said, and wouldn't until he figured out how it worked. He held out a small pill & indicated I should open my mouth. He dropped the little white pill on my tongue. His hands smelled like he probably worked on cars a lot, and that's kind of how the pills tasted, very faintly.

Nothing happened.

"Well, that one's not right," he said cheerfully, and flipped around in the book some more. Was it random? Was he looking for something in particular? I kept patiently answering questions, thinking he'd probably give up at some point. I wasn't really sure what I'd do if he didn't, and everybody else had lost interest in the proceedings and wandered into the kitchen to help get dinner ready.

I don't know how many little pills later, dinner was on the table. He was undeterred, and making increasingly detailed notes on the backs of matchbook covers and fragments of gas station receipts. I was losing interest and starting to talk to my friends about dinner and our upcoming trip. I thought maybe he'd at least take a break for dinner.

"Onions!" Mr. X said suddenly, out of nowhere. "Do you like onions?"

"Yes of course." I said.

"Garlic?" Duh.

"How about eggs? Do you eat eggs?"

I had to laugh. We'd had an omelet with onions, garlic, feta cheese and spinach just that morning. I admitted as much. Everybody laughed and someone pointed out that there were onions, garlic, and/or eggs in everything on the table.

"It's sulfur poisoning. That's what's causing her pain," he told my friends and popped another damn pill in my mouth.

I don't know if you can imagine what it felt like to have that kind of intense and enduring pain go away instantaneously. I can't really describe it in any useful way except to admit that it did, in fact, go away entirely. And suddenly. Like it was never there. I'm not talking about gradual pain relief here, like when you take an aspirin and notice half an hour later that your head hasn't hurt for a while.

I try, in general, to maintain a cool and unreadable exterior, but something must have shown on my face, because Mr. X slammed his book shut triumphantly and said, "I don't know how the hell it worked, but look at her!"

By then I was a little freaked out. I mean, something had happened, but what?

Was I just tired of the procedure and something clicked in my brain or somewhere and laid off the pain just to make Mr. X stop talking? Was I finally ready to let go of my attachment to pain? Had I indeed been poisoned in childhood by sulfur and now I was somehow cured by the vibrational energy of sulfur on a sugar pill?

What the fuck?

Did the pain go away because I wanted it to, and if so, could I do it again if I had to? Was the pain even real? Had it been there to begin with? Would it be back? When? Was the first pill really morphine, or maybe some kind of alien pain-relief technology? Was this what faith healing was all about?

Dinner was good, if a little surreal. We heard a little more about the aliens, and Mr. X's efforts to disprove homeopathy and teach physics to indifferent students, and we were promised a signed copy of his homeopathy book when it comes out.

The camping trip was great. I hate camping, but I had a blast. Nothing hurt, not even in the morning after sleeping on the ground. I ran around and played with the kids in the next campsite -- to the complete amazement my lovely ex-wife, who had not ever seen me run in the four or five years she'd known me.

That was maybe ten years ago or so. You're probably wondering whether the pain ever came back. Some regular old aches and pains, yeah sure. Some were kind of lingering and intense, but they went away again. But never the gritty radioactive kind, no, not until a couple of months ago when I had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic. And it's intermittent and doesn't seem to affect every single joint simultaneously. So no, it hasn't really come back in its former glory just yet. But it could.

Did the experience change my mind about homeopathy? Do I now believe that the vibrational essence or whatever of a thing can cure you of a symptom or a disease? Do I go see Mr. X or another homeopath every time I have a new symptom of something?

No. No. And no.

I just can't believe in it. It doesn't make sense. Something happened, OK. Something neither I nor Mr. X, bless his weird heart, was prepared to understand. I, however, am not going to devote my life to proving, disproving, or advocating the use of homeopathy.

I will not be converted.