Dr. Atkins agreed with you, Dina. In his book, he recommended eating about the level of carbs you stated above for at least a few days prior to having a glucose tolerance test or the results would be skewed (inaccurate) precisely for the reasons you gave.
As for the "standard" diabetic diet, IMHO it's a good recipe to make lifelong customers for the drug companies because the longer you stay on it, the more medications you are likely going to need.
Paul...it's up to you, but you can do an experiment and compare the results. Follow the diet that your doctor is prescribing for 2 weeks. Follow it exactly; weigh and record everything you eat. Record your blood sugar results, fasting, pre and post meal (preferably right next to your recorded food intake) and bedtime, for those two weeks. Then go back to low carb and do the same thing. If those numbers don't convince your doc which works better, I don't know what else possibly could. At the very minimum, it should convince you which is going to work better to control your diabetes and you can make an informed decision from there.