Hi, jake777:
The reason I have tips to take down flares is because I have had AS for such a long time--long before this great communication medium--and I remember what helped me. In the previous eleven years, I have had only about three major flares, each one taken down rapidly by my own methods and then being extra-strict.
And honestly, even the NSD did not seem to work very well at first--yes, I noticed some reduction in intensity of pain symptoms, but I was not convinced until I decided to do a real test of Ebringer's assertion about bacteria.
Down in Mexico I bought all the antibiotics I could think of and tried each of them serially and methodically. In fact when one batch of antibiotics did not work, I was able to identify it within four days and get right back, since I had withheld several pills from each of several other date codes.
And I tried some antibiotics, some without studying them very well, so I can say that those agents that have no action against
Klebsiella pneumoniae also had no anti-AS activity.
I proved it for myself--that AS is caused by a bowel germ (
PROBABLY Klebsiella) and that diet has a profound role in this disease. I already knew that from my fasting experiences, but I did not know how fasting worked until Ebringer's explanation.
More than a year after starting antibiotics, I was able to stop them and also stop eating dairy products, to allow my diet alone to control all AS symptoms. It was more than three years after starting the diet+antibiotics before my gut was healed enough to tolerate some starches--first well-washed rice and then cooked vegetables, even carrots. Today I almost never react despite getting very sloppy with diet, but if and when I feel any familiar twinge coming on I know what to do--fast, take antibiotics, or just clamp down on my diet. I never want to experience iritis again, and I have already damaged my vision from this horrible aspect of AS--but NO IRITIS for over eleven years now--since NSD+antibiotics.
So, it is easy to question whether it works, and not so easy to find out for yourself but with people who do the NSD it is not really up for debate anymore. Just for the encouragement of others, however, I have done several literature searches, but the most remarkable find was made by a now former member (I am beginning to understand why NSDers are eventually banned so often), and George McCaffery: Carol Sinclair.
I did not know why so much previous literature was devoted against starches and AS:
Giraud Campbell, and Edgar Cayce's biographer, Thomas Sugrue was told to avoid starches, and independent of Ebringer at first was Carol Sinclair's experiences long before she knew she had AS or heard of Ebringer and also fully independent of Ebringer was Jackie LeTissier who controlled her AS focusing upon starches in a food combining technique. Dr. Jean Seignalet, Dr. Mercola, and still others are anti-starch, anti-refined grains for AS and also for other arthritides.
These studies are not coincidental--there is far more material against starch than against anything else for AS.
But the best way is to convince yourself. You might do this by doing what Darryn has done and we all do--the round-trip ticket back to AS by going starch free for a long time--long enough to eliminate most symptoms--and then "experimenting" with starches.
The problem is that such experiments will not always produce flares; it is a dynamic statistical thing that incorporates the basic starch, the food combinations, the character of the food during digestion, the status of the gut, etc.
I do not react to rice anymore, but a couple of plates of onion rings might do me in.
We do need to take some of the subjectivity out of the NSD experience, and have a better measure of disease activity, so there are "indicators" --people with AS who have inflammation that is tracked by ESR (sed rate) and "non-indicators" almost 40% of ASers who do not have elevated sed rates with more active disease.
In over 90% of those who just do the LSD to their comfort level, ESR was considerably lower after 9 months (the chart is in the Medical Centre section AS and RA papers: something like "The Etiopathogenesis of AS and the Cross-Tolerance Hypothesis").
The chart has people with very high ESR numbers--60 and 70 but they only come down to 40 or 50 after nine months! They would then not perceive any benefit from their diet because they are still in pain. So we have people who claim "diet did not work for me" but they never had a proper measure--they were unable to give it a chance. I would have been HAPPY had I not been able to MAKE the diet work for me--I was a vegetarian!
And taking NSAIDs or any other drug to ease the pain and symptoms of AS, will make us less aware of the role of diet in this disease. It is of key importance to have the ability to "listen" to our bodies.
And to expand upon what jroc has already said--yes the integrity of the intestinal tract is key, but a person who has AS for many years is certainly harboring colonies of Klebsiella outside the gut--within the body's interstices--and these produce a constant level of AS that cannot be addressed by diet at all. In such cases, bactericidal agents are required to take these colonies down.
It is very difficult to make diet the entire answer, but it can be done with a diet like a classic Eskimo one. The real challenge is to do the NSD without so much reliance upon heavy meats and make it a bit more forgiving, but mostly to do this with better tools than just subjectively observing how we "feel;" that gets us off the hook too easily.
HEALTH,
John
