Hello, scubagirl:
The transition from carb-burner to protein and fat-burner takes several months and true there are times our energy is unacceptably low. But the long-term benefits are worth the efforts. I have never seen anyone use the word "cure." These
Success Stories are really a minor sampling of how diet affects AS. There is plenty of literature that independently supports dietary control of AS; it is not new and not first discovered by Professor Alan Ebringer et al at Kings College, London.
DIET is not easily subjected to double-blind, multicentric, placebo-controlled experiments that are demanded by the drug-pushing hypocrites (they never meet their own standards). However, on a personal level we can each prove the diet connection to ourselves. I used to control my flares by fasting and did water-only fasts up to 20 days.
Control of my own AS through diet was a very spotty thing at first and I can tell You in no uncertain terms that eating yams and squash will not provide proper results; even condiments and supplements must be tested to confirm their starch-free status.
Because Ebringer et al found that AS is caused by a germ and identified that germ, they were able to do some
preliminary small studies related to allowing the patient to control their own microbiome. Their "London AS Diet" was given to all of their AS patients at the Middlesex AS Clinic, London.
Upon learning of this work, I decided to combine extreme starch restriction with antibiotics and I got very lucky and after several cycles of bactericidal agents and bacteriostatic for maintenance, I was able to control my symptoms using diet alone. I found this was not very practical when traveling, so I returned to the combination of Carol Sinclair's (The IBS Low Starch Diet) essentially NO starch diet (NSD) with antibiotics. After about six years of this, I was no longer sensitive to starches, where at one time this was a provable S-R (stimulus-response) phenomenon, measured by ESR that I could get on-demand where I was living in Philippines.
I no longer have such a restricted diet and have not taken antibiotics regularly in almost 10 years.
Regrettably, I did not learn about diet and the germ-cause of AS until after considerable permanent skeletal damage had already been done, but my primary goal was to save my eyesight (iritis) and stop the kidney stones: Diet accomplished both of these.
Professor Ebringer suggested we could "turn the clock back about two years" through diet, but I needed
twenty years.
There is no doubt that the practice of the medical guilds will one day catch up to the medical science, but most of us should not wait for our doctors, but take some initiative for ourselves.
Good Luck with whatever You decide.
HEALTH,
John