Alan,
I truly cannot begin to imagine the horror of what you have been through in your many years of AS. What you have is clearly a particularly difficult and painful form of AS. It breaks my heart to hear of anyone suffering so much for so long and I wish with all of my strength that medical science would come up with a cure or a treatment which would help you and everyone else with AS.
But I will repeat what I said in my earlier post:
"In talking about symptoms of AS, it's important to remember, that the family of spondyloarthopathies includes several different diseases, each with unique diagnostic criteria and some with more than one set of possible diagnostic criteria. This situation can create a great deal of confusion even among qualified and competent medical professionals because even the medical profession is not in full agreement about how to diagnose AS and related autoimmune disease. That statement is not meant to denigrate the medical profession. Medicine is of its very nature an inexact and still evolving science and therefore does not have everything sorted out and neatly categorized. Doctors are doing their best to develop reliable diagnostic criteria, but they aren't there yet. Moreover, within the diagnostic criteria for a given disease, there is a range of symptoms which meet those criteria. Because of that, each individual's manifestation of a disease will be unique to that person. Toss is what Wendy said about the overlap between autoimmune diseases and you have a challeging situation indeed, both for doctors and patients."
The fact that I do not have symptoms like yours either in quality or quantity does not in and of itself mean that I don't have a form of spondyloarthropathy.
I do not care to discuss any further with you my relationship with the medical profession as you seem unable to hear what I am saying and you persist in making disparaging remarks about what I have done. Clearly our philosophies of medical care are different. I promise to treat your approach to medicine respectfully and ask that you do the same for me.
I am finished with this discussion.
kare
