What do you do when witches are eating your hair?

(This post has appeared on africanaturalistas.com)

When I was in senior secondary school, I had a close friend who had a coin-sized patch at the left side of her head. That patch made her look very strange and weird, and she sometimes came late to school because she was having to attend one appointment or the other, in order to seek solution to her hair problems

One day, she confided in me and said they had seen a white garment pastor who said it was witches eating that part of her hair and anytime the hair tried to grow, witches would keep eating it.

She told me this in all seriousness, and so I took her very serious

But even at that age and exposure, I knew there was something a bit off about blaming witches for one’s hair loss. I mean, we have heard of witches drinking and sucking blood, and because of that wreaking havoc on human lives and hair, which I don’t even want to get into since this is not a religious or metaphysics blog.

But witches eating hair???

What exactly do they want to use the hair to do? How does the hair increase their power? It’s a different case if the seer said they were plucking it with their hands, so my friend could look unattractive to guys, and should affect her chances of marriage. But he said they were eating it. Oh puhleeaaassseee.

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Anyway, about a year or more later, the witches decided to stop eating my friend’s hair, and her scalp completely filled back up. Maybe they had done a lot of deliverance and anointing services, and the witches couldn’t resist the pastor’s powers anymore. And that was the end of the story.

Fast forward to this year, I suddenly remembered my friend, who is now a runway model, and I laughed. My career as a Holistic Practitioner of Trichology has exposed me to several cases of hair and scalp disorders.

So I began to replay the whole situation of my friend’s hair loss in 1997-1998. She had nothing more than Alopecia Areata. This is a form of here loss caused by an auto-immune disorder, where the body wrongly recognizes cells of part of the hair as harmful. And then, it begins to attack that area, and kill off all the cells, just like what chemotherapy is supposed to do to cancer cells.

Since it’s an auto-immune disorder, nothing can be done about it to treat it internally. In many cases, after a while, it corrects itself, and things go back to normal. The length of time it takes for it to correct itself varies from person to person. This condition, in many cases, is triggered by severe stress with a combination of other things.

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Of course, my friend and her family didn’t know this. They saw a very strange, inexplicable patch of her hair that wouldn’t fill up. They had no explanation for it, and the next thing was to resort to a white garment pastor who told them that witches had been eating her hair, thus sending them on a wild goose chase of anointing and deliverance. To be honest, I don’t blame them. We know that people fear what they don’t understand.

So the question now is… what do you do when witches are eating your hair? The answer is simple. Just see a trichologist!

Atilola Moronfolu (HPT) is a certfied hair care expert and a holistic practitioner of trichology certified and accredited by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners and Mahogany Hair Revolution, Los Angeles, California. You can visit her Hair Clinic website by clicking here. To book a hair clinical appointment with Atilola in Lagos Nigeria, send a mail to hairconsult@africanaturalistas.com or call 07061141501.