Hi John

You and Bilko have shown a meaningful silence to the last posts I addressed to you. You quoted "...there's no use crying, and saying 'puss! puss! puss!" ../..and, if called by a panther, I sthill won't anther”. The interpretation has to be that you are unable to anther the arguments presented there.

Where does that leave us? Well first the things it doesn't do. It does not denigrate in any way the work of Ebringer which you and others have praised here and elsewhere. It does not reduce the value of the NSD / LSD diet and its contribution to the better health of AS sufferers. It does not even prove that there are some diagnosed with AS who do not benefit from the diet.

What it does show is that you cannot use Ebringer’s studies to scientifically prove there are no diet-insensitive AS sufferers, which is what you and others attempted to do earlier in this thread. Since he filtered out those AS volunteers without high levels of Klebsiella antibodies, which is not done by rheumatologists, he left open the possibility that there are among those diagnosed with AS today some who do not meet this criteria. According to Bilko, Ebringer decided they did not have AS. But since the Klebsiella antibody test is not generally done these people have been currently diagnosed with AS and we don’t know who they are.

It could be these people, the ones who Ebringer would say did not have AS, who genuinely do not respond to diet. I cannot prove that is the case but equally you cannot prove it is not.

Now I would like to change direction a little and use Ebringer to support my side of the argument. I know that this leaves me exposed among all you Ebringerphiles. But let’s give it a try.

At the time of his studies presumably diagnosis of AS was done in much the same way as it is today without the Klebsiella antibody test. So among the group of volunteers he screened for his studies there would be some who met the normal criteria which doctors use today but did not have a high level of Klebsiella antibodies (let’s call them Low-Kleb AS for short). These people had already been diagnosed with AS by doctors presumably and if they did not have AS they probably had something closely related. Why screen them out? Why not conduct the study including both groups and then report separately on the findings? If he believed both would respond to his NSD / LSD diet there would be no good reason to eliminate them from the study. In fact inclusion of both groups would surely enhance the acceptance of his studies by the medical establishment. He would then have studied all those diagnosed with AS by doctors.

Screening out the Low-Kleb AS would make sense however, if, in his practical experience as a rheumatologist, he had already learned that they did not respond to his diet. His goal was to prove the effectiveness of the NSD / LSD diet on patients with AS. It seems likely then that he screened out Low-Kleb AS from his diet studies because they would compromise this goal.

To bolster the case I will repeat what I said earlier about my own diagnosis. I believe the symptoms for which I was diagnosed AS - B27+, ankylosed back, history of back problems, pain and stiffness in the back - existed at times long before I was actually diagnosed. But it was only after a course of NSAIDs that I developed arthritic symptoms, flares and sensitivity to food. The NSAID may have caused damage to the gut which increased the levels of Klebsiella. But earlier I would have had all the classic symptoms of AS (Klebsiella unknown) with absolutely no sensitivity to food. I now have the sensitivity and I know the difference! If there are people diagnosed with AS who are like me a few years ago they would genuinely not have any sensitivity to food.

I am more convinced now than when I began this post that among those diagnosed with AS today there are some who genuinely are not sensitive to diet. They may well be the Low-Kleb AS discussed above.

Wally