Many famous people have or had ankylosing spondylitis:
- Ed Sullivan, variety show host
- Norman Cousins, entertainer
- Mick Mars, guitarist for Mötley Crüe
- Christopher Pappas, singer-songwriter
- Rico Brogna, MLB player (Phillies and Mets)
- Vladimir Borisovich Kramnik, Russian world chess champion
- Ada Choi Siu Fun, actress and model
- Mike Atherton, English cricket player
- Michael Slater, Australian cricket player
- Mike Stafford, Canadian radio personality
- Jens Stoltenberg, Prime Minister of Norway
Do you have AS? We’d like to tell your story, if you want to share it with us. Send us a jpeg, too, so we can put a face on this disease, so when it raises its ugly face we can picture a better one — yours, perhaps?
We don’t all have AS and we’re not all athletes, but together we are standing tall and raising awareness.
Tags: arthritis, AS, patient, spondylitis, story
Norman Cousins did not have AS, he had reactive arthritis. This is important to people with AS, because Cousins claimed to have been cured with laughter. AS is not curable, and so the Cousins-cured-by-laughter myth is insulting to us because it implies that it’s our fault we have this disease. Please delete Cousins from your list in order to avoid spreading the myth.
Norman cousins didn’t claim to be able to cure AS with laughter, he said it reduces the symptoms of chronic pain, which is medically proven. Looks like you should give it a try, lighten up and it’ll help.
Good point, John. But unless Cousins is exhumed, we won’t know for sure. If we don’t delete him maybe we’ll at least add an asterisk by his name as we go about “spring cleaning” the site in the next couple of weeks.
It is true that many experts these days are suspecting that he didn’t have AS. However (Tom), having lived through the “Norman Cousins” era, I know first hand that he frequently claimed that he and was said to have cured his “terminal” illness by laughter.
We know that AS is not, in itself, terminal — if that’s what he had. But no doubt, keeping a positive attitude helps — if you have the luxury of keeping a positive attitude. Not all of us can do that all the time. I sure can’t.
In any case, we’d really prefer that remarks on our Web site be positive and supportive of one another. We have enough other things bringing us down, don’t we? Like gravity?