Can the s quark be treated as heavy in spectroscopy?

In the heavy quark limit, the two mass eigenstates of the heavy-flavored mesons with JP=1+ are labeled with the total angular momentum of the light system j=1/2 and 3/2. If the s quark were treated as heavy, both the d-to-s-wave ratio of the decay K1→K*π and a recent analysis of the τ-decay mode τ→ντK1 would suggest that the lighter meson K1(1270) should be assigned to the j=3/2 state, while the heavier K1(1400) be the j=1/2 state. This level pattern would require the spin-orbit coupling for the strange mesons to be opposite in sign to that for the nonstrange mesons and for the charmonia