The DECAD Framework: A New Way to Understand Chronic Lyme

Opening Message and Podcast Introduction 0:00

I think if there's anything big takeaway from this talk today that I want someone to hear is that it's never going to be the before. It's not going be before COVID ever again. Medicine needs to have a wake-up call here. Our patients are dealing with this. They are victims of biowarfare. That's what Gain of Function was doing was trying to stay ahead of if they were going any biobarfair released on us. Other countries are doing it in case they are going a victim of it. We all ended up being that because of the lab leak.

We're all working in a post-war era of a war that actually didn't happen. It was a leak. But we're not adapting medicine at all. Hi, and welcome to the Lime Bites podcast, where we shine a light on the misunderstood science of Lyme and other vector-borne diseases, as well as the truths that many still miss. I'm Dr. Mariah Hinchy, naturopathic physician and fellow of the Medical Academy of Pediatric Special Needs. I specialize in treating chronic Lyme disease as well as other complex inflammatory conditions.

In this podcast we break down what's working and what is not. We share the facts that most people miss, we challenge outdated thinking, and we give both patients and practitioners the tools to heal smarter. So let's get into it and change the way we heal Lyma. Welcome to another episode of the Lime Bites podcast, Rebuilding Immunity, Reducing Inflammation, and Redefining Recovery. I'm your host, Dr. Maria Hinchey, naturopathic physician, founder of Tao Vitality, as well as Lyme Core Botanicals. Today, we're discussing one of newest frameworks for understanding complex chronic illness.

The role gain-of-function research may have played in bringing us all here. persistent spike protein illness, nicotine therapy, and the DECAD, a model developed by Dr. Jill Christa that helps explain the overlapping conditions driving these chronic illnesses in so many patients. My guest today is Dr Jill Krista, also a naturopathic physician, bestselling author, educator, an internationally recognized expert in environmental medicine and complex chronic illness. She is the creator of the DECAD framework, expanding on the original septad model to help clinicians better understand the interconnected drivers of chronic disease.

Gain-of-Function Research and Lab Leak Concerns 2:25

Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Krista. Thanks for having me. Always an honor. Let's dive right in and talk about the giant elephant in the room. What role has gain-of-function research played in the world of complex chronic illness that we are faced with today? Because it's not the same as it was five years ago. No, it is not. And the role of gain of function research is ginormous, and it isn't new it turns out. This all gets started and justified when we approach things from a place of fear and national security.

So, gain-of-function research actually started in World War II, if you can believe that. And there have been incidents that in declassified military documentation, that they have being modifying microbes that we would normally see with vector-borne illness, with aerated illnesses, things like a coronavirus, like common cold. that they have been modified and amplified and experimented on in these biosafety labs for, you know, going on 70 years, which is pretty profound. And also in this declassified information, we see that there have be releases of these things, both on experimental subjects and then on unknowing cities, such as San Francisco, New York, DC.

And it was all justified that this was a way that biodefense research programs needed to do this to kind of monitor and be able to catch when maybe our own public were being affected by something like this. So this is all just under this umbrella of safety. And what's interesting about it is that when you come from that umbrella, we can forget that, you know, the other side of the safety is the potential leaks of these microbes. And, what we find is, that in biosafety labs, level three and four, so a level 3 is where we would do like coronavirus gain-of-function research, a Level 4 is maybe like an Ebola.

So, they have it, air that they're breathing, they have on the big suits, and if anybody's ever seen, you know, in the movies, there's the whole suits and they are double-gloved or triple- gloved, then they've got, their own oxygen coming in and all of these wonderful things that do to protect the people that are doing this research. Unfortunately, though, when we look at how many incidents of maybe the people working there getting infected or leaks from the lab, it's on average eight leaks a month in the United States alone.

And when you compare the Canadian research, which they do have research papers that show incidents on the rate of 10 to 15 per month, in their biosafety lab three and four. So this is This is the problem is not only are we teaching microbes how to do what they do better and against a human and potentially against other species on the planet that share our genetics or our susceptibility, you know, like dogs got COVID too. We are also allowing them by just the nature of, you know, these labs and human nature and all of the things, mistakes and whatnot, we're allowing that out into our public.

So as I was digging through. all of this mold research. That's where I got started with this, was I was researching mycotoxins. And as I followed these trails, I am a digger, as they follow these trials about these mycotoxin that are very, very toxic, one in particular called T2 toxin. I found military documentation on how to treat soldiers who'd been exposed to T2 toxin in bio warfare. That was my first like, what? What are we talking about? These are known carcinogens, known to cause birth defects, know to be lethal in big doses.

And I knew that from the human research I was doing, then I'm finding all this military research. So that got me down the rabbit hole. Then I found things like tularemia that was purposefully modified in the Rocky Mountain labs and then used and rickettsia. I mean, this, it's so disturbing because it justified because of the whole, you know, warfare mindset. But that's not a normal way of thinking. Normal people don't really want all of this to happen. And so that is how we have gotten here. Those of us who have been treating Lyme and complex illnesses, we know that these conditions, this septad of conditions.

I can explain what that in a minute. we know that that's been on the rise in our patients. And we all have had the cases where someone gets a tick bite, you treat them for four to six weeks, they get better, move on, it's just in their past. Then there are these people who happen to get what seems like almost like a super strain of Borrelia or tick-borne relapsing fever Borrelia or Rickettsia. It's like they can't something about them or the bug just is not getting better. And as I found this research, I was like, oh, it's more the book.

I think it is one of those crap shoots of did you get the amplified strain or did get natural strain? And I would love if it was possible to do some sort of study where we could look at those people that are really struggling with all these conditions that have been on the rise pre-COVID. and now they are really, really suffering post-COVID, how many of them are dealing with a gain-of-function product in their body? So expand on the gain of function with COVID specifically, like whether it's the virus or with the vaccine.

Yeah, so what we find is that there were modifications made to the spike protein itself. So this is going to be in both the infection version and the vaccine version where there is an insert, a genetic protein or peptide that they describe

COVID Spike Protein, Venom, and the DECAD Model 8:40

as a generic insert. This was not something nature did and these peptides are toxin-like peptids. And they found early on in COVID, people who had this very inflammatory event with their COVID. So there's a term in medicine, it's similar to toxic shock syndrome. They tested the people that had that serious, like over the top cytokine storm type of COVID experience. And then they tested controls who have never had COVIDs. This is early when we actually had people never exposed. in the people that were having this big inflammatory toxic shock-like syndrome, they found these toxin- like peptides in their blood that we're never, not rarely or 2% or whatever, never found in people who had not had COVID.

So this is something unique to COVID, They also looked at previous SARS, MERS blood, and it was not found in that. So this is something unique to COVID. I don't think it's unique, to gain a function, however, but it is unique. And the problem is that these peptides, are similar to some of the most potent clot-forming neurotoxic peptides on the planet from snake venoms and a cone shell, a deep-sea cone-shell. So they're snake venom and conotoxins. Now my new name for COVID is virus plus venom. makes sense, it describes it all, right?

Let's describe what it actually really is. And we can test people for this. This is part of what I'm going to be teaching at LimeBytes is that, and if anybody's listening wants to get this info, please make sure and come to this conference because this is where I am going be laying out like, how am I testing people this burden? You can kind of get ahead of it and then you know what your body burden is and what i've found, the reason that I've moved it from septad to defgad, which we could go through those conditions, It's now the tie that binds what before seemed like very disparate sort of conditions that didn't have a unifying cause, now has a unified cause.

It is not just the virus, it's not the just venom, its the effect of the venom. So those conditions, the septad was kind of a description of these conditions where people tend to come to complex chronic illness, people like us, and if they have one, they often have like four of Well, I expanded that to Decad because if we're looking at virus plus venom, it brings in more conditions. So the biggie is dysautonomia. It's a huge problem. it was on the rise already, but much worse since COVID. POTS or postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, hypermobility syndromes that aren't due to like, there are people who have EDS from a genetics, these are the non-genetic hyper mobility, which has gone through the roof in incidents since Covid.

through the roof, mast cell activation syndrome, MECFS, which is chronic fatigue syndrome. Which a lot of times that mold alone can do that, but that also has been on the rise and it isn't only mold. Like if it's not mold, it can be this other virus plus venom condition or cause. Small fiber neuropathy, certain autoimmune diseases like antiphospholipid antibody syndrome. Interestingly enough, which I'll cover at the specifics at this conference, but interestingly enough the way we diagnose that condition is by exposing someone's blood to venom and seeing if they overreact.

And why would they react? Because they have it in their body and their immune system is already primed for it. So then I'm adding gastroparesis, which means this is kind of a little bit of dysautonomia issue. If we have mold, mycotoxins, this can slow down peristalsis. But we see it very commonly post-COVID. People's stomach just doesn't empty. Their peristasis doesn' move. Long haulers, so that could be COVID, Lyme, mold. Other chronic infections. And hypercoagulability, and that's probably the most important one.

out of all of it, that venoms are known to be clot formers. These particular venom, there are different venomes all over the planet, but this particular collection of toxin-like peptides that was found in these early COVID people, They are known to be very, very potent prothrombins, meaning clot formers. But what's really confusing to medicine, and thankfully I had mold research already and mold experience, mycotoxins cause this as well, but it's a clotting bleeder. So the blood vessels become very destabilized, the the is thick and clotty.

You can get this confusing picture. In medicine we're kind of taught that someone's either a clotter or they're a bleader. But you get these friable, unstable vessels. If you have a clot in there, they can actually have both bleeding and clotting at the same time. So that's the DECAD, and that can all be tied together by this one thing, virus plus venom. Yeah, and it's interesting because these are the symptoms that we see in vector-borne diseases like Lyme and co-infections that We see and mold-related illness like we say in long COVID, etc.

And the thing that always drives me crazy is I'll have a patient come in and they're like, oh, by the way, you know, I saw so and so in great news. I have POTS or I of MCAS or IVDS and It's like okay, all you've done. is put a name on a cluster of symptoms that we already knew that you had and that, we know that these various conditions cause in people. So it's frustrating when people try to look at these things as root causes when really they're just a symptom of the underlying organism, you know, or virus plus venom.

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Or toxin or whatever. You know, I love that you mentioned that. I wish that we would rename mass cell activation reaction. of reactions, but really it's reacting to something. Our body is, and that's the tide of the venom. When someone, I was presenting at a mast cell conference and somebody brilliantly asked the question of, why would something like mast cells and overreaction even be conserved evolutionarily? Why would our body, why would we keep that? You know, what's good about that?" And I thought that was such a great question, because that then got my wheels turning, like, yeah, well, evolution allow something so inconvenient and, you know really life altering.

How Spike Protein Drives Chronic Symptoms 17:20

And when I dug in on that evolutionary biology, two reasons. B-venom, not B venom. Parasites and venom, venoms of all kinds. Those are the two reason why this has been conserved evolutionarily. And so when we're like, okay. I didn't put parasites on the DECAD because that's its own thing. That's an infection that we know and that is a different cause. You can have parasites and have mast cell activation reaction. I'm going to be on that tear for a while. But you can no parasites, and still have mass cell activations reactions because you're being exposed to venom.

And what we now know about COVID and spike is that they're hijacking our own flora, our microbiome. This effect is called a bacteriophage. So the virus gets into our micro biome and forces our microbes to become virus factories, spike factories. So this is a big deal. You know, so someone, even if you haven't had the vaccine, you can become your own spike factory just by, it's hijacked. That's how we know this has amplified. Something in nature wouldn't figure that out. So explain to our listeners why these various conditions that make up the DECAD happen together.

Why do they occur together? What is driving it from like a pathophysiological standpoint? Great. So the virus itself, if we think about what we were all told, and it's true, that it binds to ACE2 receptors. And that's only one of the binding sites, though. There is a second forgotten binding site and receptor. But that one alone is really important to know because it tells us where is it going to go. When it gets in the body, where's it gonna go? Well, these ACE2 receptors are like a repair tag on a cell.

They're like the cell going, hey, I need, when we have extra resources, you know, and the person's eating right and getting good sleep, getting outside and can I get this, door jam fixed or whatever. So it's like little repair tags out there. They are highly expressed on epithelial tissues. And as a doc, we all already know what that means. But for regular people, that mean the entire lining of our respiratory passages. Our eyes, that's why a lot of people are saying, don't touch your eyes. Don't your touch eyes because this, especially this last round is really causing a lots of styes in the eye.

So the hair follicle gets infected because it's lined with epithelial tissue. That also is our skin. There's a a of weird rashes that have popped up, lots itchy rations that are popped with COVID. The lining of our digestion, so our entire GI lining. And the most problematic from a clot standpoint is the lining our blood vessels. So, the one reason why these are all tied is the type of tissue that express these ACE2 receptors. Guess who else has a lot of ACE-2-receptors? Mass cells. guess who has these receptors?

The brain stem. The basal ganglia. So that's the tie to a panda's pants. Or, you know, people are getting these neurological problems. So there's that receptor and there is that tissue type that can get infected. And when the cell gets infected, it has to die so that its neighbor doesn't get affected because that's one of the things viruses do is cell-to-cell transfer. We saw that the country of Thailand, they adopted andrographis as a COVID treatment because it prevented cell to cell transfer, so then you were only dealing with one sick cell and not a neighborhood of sick cells.

That is still, I'm finding that still to be very effective. Are you still seeing that work for your long COVID people or even acute? Honestly, i wasn't even using andrographis. So here I am learning from you every time you come on anything with me. Likewise. Yeah, I mean, king of the bitters. Why not? Of course it would make so much sense, right? It helps the detoxification part and the lymph part. So that when that virus cell gets sick, it's supposed to die and get out of way. What we're finding is that in the dying process, Because of the venom part, there's not the repopulation of a new healthy cell as quickly or as efficiently.

So we get little eddies in the blood vessels, and the eddy is where clots can form if you have a pro-clot environment. There's this other whole receptor, though, that has to do with the the venom part. You've got the virus, ACE2, venom, the nicotinic receptor. Now you've two places where this baby can bind in body. Once it's bound, it can hide. So on that other receptor, they're a technical name, but we can just call them the nicotinic receptors. But what's important about this particular kind of nicotenic receptor is it's part of our central nervous system, the autonomic running of your body.

And when this is bound, it becomes ineffectual. So what's supposed to happen is when that receptor gets bound, it stimulates a chemical that we consider a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, which runs a lot of our background autonomic things. Like if you have enough tears, if your blood pressure manages you standing up, It can adapt like that. That's all a nervous system thing. Are your fingernails growing? Do we have to think about that? You know, did you think of how your finger nails growing off?

No. I mean, we just don't think So this receptor, when it goes offline, those autonomic processes get a hiccup. They have a little delay. Maybe they don't stimulate at all because that receptor is now bound and offline. So that's where nicotine comes in is it's displacing the spike protein off that, receptor and allowing that to run normally again. The problem is when we take it off the receptor, that little spike that is virus plus venom is very inflammatory. It's now loosey-goosey, free in the blood, and can cause more problems and more clotting.

And it may just go find another place to hang out. it might find an ACE2 receptor on a mast cell. I might found another nicotinic receptor to lodge into and disrupt the nervous system. Right, which is why it's so important to have various agents on board prior to starting nicotine therapy that are going to help to break down and degrade the spike protein as well as, you know, doing sweat therapy, right? So we don't want to dislodge the spiked protein and have nothing there to handle it and no way for it to get out of the body.

Right. So I think of nicotine as kind of the middle of a sandwich. It's the meat part, but you have to have the top and the bottom. I thing of it as three steps that have happen that the first one is prepping for the free-floating spike. These conditions are very life-altering and disruptive, but they're not acutely dangerous. Free-floating spike is acuetly dangerous, we've seen people get that didn't do the prep or the third step, so it's prep, dislodge, dissolve. Those are kind of the three things that I'm thinking like in my head.

Nicotine Therapy: Candidates, Risks, and Support 24:55

Make sure you do the prep, then the dislodging is the nicotine, and then you dissolve it with the enzymes. I've had doctors hear talks that i've done and put someone on a nicotin patch without any of that homework. And let me tell you, we have had strokes, We have have clots, acute clot,s people had to be hospitalized. Insomnia, intractable insomnia because nicotine is not right for everybody. There are risk factors to this. We've had blood pressure that went through the roof and it took a month to get them back down again.

And if you're using nicotin on a regular basis, while it's not addictive, it does increase your tolerance for it. So then you're going to get the more you use nicotine, the potential receptors you have that the body will start to go, well, I only had one receptor on every cell and now I'm using nicotin maybe for a couple of weeks because these conditions can take a while to manage. Okay, now, two receptors. Now, three. Four. Five. Because there's more nicotein there and the bodies says, yummy, like that.

But the problem is those receptors also see what? They see spike protein. The more you use it, the more of a sponge you become to spike and the chance you have for it hijacking your microbiome. I love it as a therapy, but it is a therapeutic. It is drug and we're using it therapeutically, even as an Hbath. This is one of the things I want to get the word out and why I think it's important for people to trained on how to do this safely, all of those conditions and all those things can be mitigated and managed if we're doing it right.

And I know that there's a natural agent that you often use that helps to stop the increased development of receptors when you're using nicotine therapy. So you can share that if you'd like, but I'd also like you to talk a little bit about what patients are actually the best candidates for nicotin therapy? Are you suffering from Lyme disease or another complex chronic illness and aren't sure who to trust when it comes to herbal supplements? Hi, I'm Dr. Mariah Hinchey, founder of Lynecore Botanicals.

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And now I'm making them available to practitioners and patients everywhere. Lymecore Botanicals, herbal medicine you can trust from a doctor who lives this work. Learn more at LymencoreBotanicles.com Great. Yeah, so if we use L-theanine, L theanin is shown to prevent the excessive upregulation of receptors to nicotine. And it's also really calming. So, you know, when I was thinking about that person that the doctor was working with whose blood pressure went through the roof, one of the things we needed to do is help them break down acetylcholine.

Some people have a genetic a genetic mutation where they don't break down acetylcholine very efficiently. So once it's made, it is out there. And once we release the Kraken, so to speak, we get the nicotine off and that receptor goes online, sometimes there's a little catch-up time that the body will make extra. Then here she was, not being able to break this down. I was thinking, wow, now that could we help her break that down, but we could have given her Theanine, you know, of course, I didn't find out about it until a month later, but I was like, oh my gosh, we could have done so many things to help them, deal with it.

But that would be somebody who it's not a good idea. There are other things we can do for this problem. So we have a huge toolbox as naturopathic doctors. The people that it is really good for is if you have like six or seven of those DECAD conditions, This is definitely something to put on your try list because it is treating not just COVID virus plus venom, but I think the long history of whatever has been done to these microbes throughout the Long History of Gain of Function research. So is there anyone who you would say is absolutely contraindicated from using nicotine therapy?

Yeah, there are some genetic mutations, like a COMT mutation. I just don't even play with it. You know, people are like, well, we could cut the patch really, really small. And I'm like why? We have other tools. Nicotine does the best. The way that it works is that, it has the highest affinity for this receptor. So it's the biggest magnet to that receptor and spike this inserted genetic insertion of peptide, this toxin-like peptides has a really strong affinity for this receptor, even stronger than a lot of the nicotinic plants like lobelia.

There are others that we use in medicine to help people get off smoking, but the spike I have found is even a stronger affinity than the herbs do. So it is, I tried even just tobacco, using tobacco in a glycerate. It tastes kind of like a, it has a prickly effect in the mouth and it tastes like an ashtray. So I'm always like, you know, we do this for kids because we don't want to put them on a patch necessarily if they're a little, but these kids are getting put on biologics and things that are really suppressing their immune system.

And then people get squeamish about using nicotine on the 10-year-old. But you're going to put them on a biologic before you try something you can buy at the gas station? Come on. You know, but I'm whatever. I meet people where they're at. We've tried that nicotine glycerate with kids and I always warn them. It's going be like a prickly ashtray in your mouth. And they were like, oh great. Yeah, those plants don't work as well as straight nicotine because I think of the modification. I mean, this is one of things that how it was amplified was to be very sticky and magnetic to that receptor.

So, taking a few steps back. So obviously, if you have a patient that has a multitude of these various symptoms or conditions that are part of the DECAD, that would kind of obviously give you clinical suspicion that this is what's going on. But beyond that, I know that there are several biomarkers that you can look at as well. to help identify these patients. I know you're going to be going through all of them in great detail during your live presentation, but are there a couple you can share with us now?

For sure, yeah. So as I dug into the long history of gain-of-function research, I found different ways that they've been monkeying with the bugs, and there are ways we can test for these certain toxin-like peptides. Something like having an antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, that already puts you in the camp of, hey, your blood is reacting to venom. Maybe we'll want to take a look at that. Sometimes I will even run that lab, even if I'm not suspicious of that condition in somebody, I might run that lab just to see if their body is having even a mild reaction to the venoms used for that.

You don't have to have the condition to some reaction of the venom.

Testing Spike Load and Biomarkers 33:05

I also love to look at the spike antibody to find out what is the load for the person. So LabCorp has an on-demand, you can order it for yourself. You don't even need a doctor. I really love this test because of the access for people. Many HMOs, hospital systems, medical systems prevent their doctor from being able to order it. So I appreciate that. This test self-watered is like $69, so it's very affordable. It's reasonable, yeah. And I don't know about where your limits are, but if they're over a thousand, my warning signs are up.

And if there are over 10,000, I'm like, dude, we need to get this out of your body because it is driving whatever's going on for your body right now, and for a lot of people it might just be ear ringing. And they're like, well, it's tolerable. Maybe some dysbiosis or fatigue or something that's manageable and toleratable. Now that we know that it can hijack the microbiome, you're a ticking time bomb for bigger things to have happen later. All you need is that one tick bite or that car accident or whatever.

Now your body is loaded with spike and it's just like the bucket theory. Your bucket is full and all it is going to take is one last little thing. I like to get this out of people's bodies. It's very important. I agree. I've seen actually in the past couple months, I have had at least three or four patients come back greater than 25,000. So I was told that LabCorp actually has no upper limit for testing, that you will get your real number no matter what. But actually, like I said, on three of four different patients recently, a number that is literally greater than 25,000. So we know that Quest stops measuring at greater that 2,500, but LabCorp stops, measuring it greater then 25 thousand.

And I've also had a handful of patients in the 19 thousand, 15, 16 thousand so the numbers are a lot higher. than I ever really thought they would be when I first started researching spike protein in previous interviews with Dr. Peter McCullough and things like that. So I think it's one of those things that every single person should know their number. It's just like a CBC, you know? Know your cholesterol, know your spike load. We are in the post-COVID era. I think if there's anything big take away from this talk today that I want someone to hear is that it's never going to be the before.

It is never gonna be before COVID ever again. And medicine needs to have a wake up call here. Our patients are dealing with this. victims of bio warfare. I mean, that's what gain of function was doing was trying to stay ahead of if there was going to be any bio-warfare, you know, released on us or, whatever. Other countries are doing it in case they are going be a victim of it. Well, we all ended up being that because of the lab leak, which as we learned is not rare to have these leaks. So we're all working in a post- war era of a war that actually didn't happen.

It was a leak. But we are not adapting medicine. at all. And this is a really important thing. Absolutely. When it comes to, especially, complex chronic illness, or really any chronic illnesses, right? What is at the heart of autoimmunity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, even obesity, autoimmune, it's all inflammation, and so what is this virus plus venom causing? A lot of it is inflammation, and a lot people don't realize that this chronic pro-inflammatory cascade going off in the body is what is leading to the immune dysregulation and the immuninbalance.

And it's that immune imbalance and dysregation, which a big piece is also coming from the altered microbiome, but that is these infections and toxins to stay in the body and keeps you sick, right? Keeps you not able to control these levels of organisms that frankly, a lot of us have in our bodies. I mean, if we look at the reactivation of Epstein-Barr and other herpes family viruses that happened when we have this virus plus venom, it all starts to make sense. So whether you're having acute symptoms, Or whether you're having chronic debilitating symptoms, knowing your spike protein load and knowing the levels of inflammation, like that's something that you can actually do and act on to prevent chronic illness from developing in the future.

Right. Yeah, I see all these people that, you know, longevity space. You can take all the peptides in the world and have the most perfect diet and getting all this sunshine and, doing your HBOT at home and EWAT and all of these things, but if you have this persistent Inflamazone, this triggering thing, it's like lighting fires after fire after every day. You know, treat that cause first. So you don't have to work so hard on even the longevity. It's population-wide, and that's why I'm trying to get the word out.

Thank you very much for this, because it is going to affect everybody whether you're working with a you know, a primed body and it's doing great and you're working on longevity, or you are in complex chronic illness and can't get out of the hamster wheel of chronic illnesses and inflammation. There's a root cause here and that's when I started looking at all the mechanisms and I was like, oh my god, this explains, you now, what seem to be these weird conditions that are all really complex and hard to understand.

It was, like chunk, there it is. So because this is a Lyme podcast, you know, we've talked a lot about the virus plus venom and the DECAD. Where does Borrelia, Bartonella, Babesia like, where do the vector borne illnesses and even mycotoxin illness, Where do those fit into the Decad model? I believe that in the gain-of-function research that was done on Borrelia that there are similar aspects. So it's Borrelia plus biologic, you know, B plus B is something in there. I see, and I know that you and i have talked about this, I've seen my patients who have certain, it seems to be strain-dependent Borrellia, that they are the ones that go into this complex chronic thing, they can't get out of the loop.

I have patients who have chronic Lyme that had POTS and dysautonomia that I was like, well, now I'm understanding that there's this acetylcholine-dysautomia story. Let's see if we can get you to where you can stand up from a chair and not pass out with nicotine therapy. So we were doing this on off, five days on, two days off. By the way, I do want to mention that Constant nicotine use can lead to some bone issues. So it does help with bone repair and osteoporosis, but you have to have off days when you remineralize, otherwise it can led to more bone issue.

Nicotine can also lead to biofilm issues.

Lyme, Co-Infections, Mold, and Inflammation 40:45

So you've got to be amplifying your biofilms support. It isn't as easy as, oh, I'm going to slap a patch on and give it whatever. If you're using it for these long-term conditions, here I was using to try to improve the acetylcholine story, the autonomic nervous system, and their chronic line was getting better. Hello, what? Oh, is this? And is it from an inflammatory piece? You and I are both loving knowing the cytokines and where things crossover and everything. And I do suspect that there is a very high crossover of the virus plus venom and the cytochine piece.

But there's also clotting. We've dealt with hypercoagulability in chronic Lyme patients forever. And we know that these lots of complex infections, so they're more stealth infections. We know they hijack our clotting cascade to make more fibrin and to more hidey-holes for themselves. So I think that you already have with the wisdom of the infection that it can make these biofilms to hide out. Now you've got an already pro-clot kind of environment, hypercoagulable environment. And you add something that's going to make that situation worse.

Now we have a super-clawed, very lymphatically challenged, and very inflamed patient. Where Bartonella and Babesia come in is they infect the same cells that COVID did. So they're on the endothelium, this lining of all of our blood vessels. They're also impacting the red blood cells and causing them to crack open, which creates more inflammation in the bloodstream and more clotting. So it's really a mess. When somebody has all of them, it can just amplify the problem. And pre-COVID, before we even had virus plus venom, we were seeing these kind of conditions on the rise.

Again, I do believe that a lot of this is going to be strain dependent if you have a lab variant. Yeah, that's a lots. A lot. It's a lot and it can make people just feel like, you know, fear and that's the last thing I want to do is raise fear. My intention for talking about this is to have people know that there is a solution when we treat the root cause. We thought we were treating the cause when identify infection and we eradicate infection. we didn't know there's an added something. And so as we can get more open disclosure and, you know, my reason for bringing this to the public is so that we all say, time, we don't consent.

We don' consent any more of this practice. You know that they know it's a problem. I wanted to read, Gain a Function has been rebranded now, so you always got to kind of pay attention with something that needs a rebland. You see that in politicians that they rebround them when they've oopsed, right? So now Gaint a function has a re-brand in research. If you're a doctor or a researcher, you can look for DERC, D-U-R-C. This is dual use research of concern. EPPP, which is Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogen, or PPP, potential pandemic pathogens.

And oversight of all this is handled by the U.S. Government Policy Framework, HHS. Number P3CO. So this is all who's monitoring this. And if we all decide that we're going to go ahead and face the fear, like, okay, there's a solution. There's solution, you know, whatever is thrown at us, nature always has the solution we just need to put the two together. So identify the root cause, now we know gain of function got us here and has been getting us for a very long time, not to mention, you know, pollution and all of that.

And we all say we don't consent. Now it stops the leak. And now all we're needing to do is bail out the bodies that have been exposed to this. Right. And it's so important. I want to make this point for the listeners. When you are not dealing with the virus plus venom, it makes it very, very hard to recover from mold-related illness, mycotoxin illness. from Lyme or any other vector borne disease or viral reactivation, whatever it is. Like it can literally be that just ongoing fuel leak on the fire that inhibits you from being able to get these other pathogens and toxins out of the body.

So you have to know how to assess for it. and you have to know how to safely break it down and get rid of it. And, you know, these days I am using that LabCorp test for just the spike protein antibodies on almost every single patient or client that I have. Unfortunately, I haven't had one person. Now, obviously I've a biased population. I'm very sick patients. Almost all of them have A, if not more than one vector-borne disease, as well as mold-related illness, all this other stuff. But I have not seen one person come back under 1,000. And negative is considered to be 0.8. Right.

Well, yeah. I mean, yes, it should be 0.0, but yes. The cutoff for the lab is 0 points. Under one. Right. Yeah. That's when you know what the normal value is supposed to be under one, and it's over a thousand, over 15,000. And most of them are over 10, 000. You know, especially, I mean, no offense to anybody, but especially the ones that were vaccinated and have received at least one booster. Those are the people that are up, you know that I'm seeing like up over 15,000. And that's good for them to know.

I think it's really important to get that word out to be like, Hey, if you did take the vaccine, this is a risk factor and this what we're seeing. So manage it. Are you finding that as the level comes down, their symptomatology goes down? Yeah. Yeah, I am. And I've actually kind of like reinvented my hierarchy. So you and I have talked about the 10 Bs, you know, publicly, privately, et cetera, but that first B doing the background check, in that literally includes one of the steps now is know your spike protein antibody level.

Because guess what? If it's there, it needs to be dealt with. You need to actively dealing with it either before while you are doing your treatment for the various vector-borne diseases. In my background check, I'm looking for gut permeability issues. I am looking spiked protein antibodies. We're looking at all of these other things like right from the get-go because they're going to be potential roadblocks or at least speed bumps in our ability

Closing Takeaways and Symposium Invitation 47:45

to reach the finish line you know, and put these various vector-borne diseases into remission. So interesting too, because as I've done more of the toxins as well in monitoring those labs, I don't have a big sample set, big enough sample yet, but it is fascinating that as the spike antibody load goes down, so do the toxin-like peptides. And that's not just for COVID, with the other monkey virus and whatever, rickettsia, tularemia all the things. but not at the same pace. And everybody seems to be a little bit different on how fast they can get rid of the toxin-like peptide versus the spike reactivity, because an antibody is your immune system being upset about it.

So we would expect that it would take a while for that to come down, even if you've worked that out of this system. But I'm seeing them drop within two to three months of treatment and getting it out the body. And people need to know too, if they can't tolerate nicotine or anything, this is the next deep dive I'm doing. There are over 400 plants that have been identified around the globe for venom snake, basically to survive a snake bite that, you know, ancient, people would always keep it in their bag with them, their little satchel or their bags.

And that's really important for people to note that there are so many solutions that we just haven't got around to it yet. The first thing we needed to do in medicine is wake up. This is a problem. We need to deal with this invenomation. And now, how do we deal it? And to to more elegantly. I hope you'll be sharing all of those herbs with us. Well, not all. As many as I know. And I know how to work with, you know, that's the latest game. Yeah, very happy to share this. But the first thing is we've got to collectively shine light on this as something that we all find is very important to stop this practice.

Before we end, because I can't believe it, it's almost been 50 minutes, before we and is there anything final that you would like to share with our listeners or with potential clinicians who might catch this episode? What would you want them to know about the DECAD framework and this virus plus venom. I think the biggest thing is, please understand, we're never going to be in the before COVID era ever again. And to raise your skill sets, get training, Get protocols, you know, understand the mechanisms of what we know.

There's a lot more to learn. But we are just, if you're practicing in same way that you were, unlike Dr. Hinchey who said, oh, wow, now I have folded this into my normal you know, way of practicing that's very sophisticated and now this has been folded in as part of just a good assessment. Please, as practitioners, start to understand that this is not going away. COVID isn't over. It's never going to go away, we're in a new place and we have to adapt how we do medicine. Thank you so much for sharing with us and thank you, so, much, for being here with Absolutely.

To our listeners at home, thank you so much for joining us for another episode of the Lime Bites podcast. If you enjoy today's conversation, you won't want to miss Dr. Krista's in-depth presentation at the 2026 LIME BITES symposium. She'll take an even deeper dive into the treatment aspects of DECAD, as well as nicotine therapy, and as you heard, a plethora of other herbs that can be helpful when dealing with virus plus venom. You can join us in person or virtually for her live presentation on November 13th and 14th in Pompano Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

And if today's conversation helped you, or if you know someone living with a chronic mystery illness who may still be searching for answers, please share this episode. Every share helps us reach more patients families and clinicians who desperately need this information. So until next time, keep asking questions, Keep advocating for your health and remember together we all heal stronger. If this episode gave you an answer, brought you new insight, or made you think differently, subscribe to the Line Bytes podcast and share with someone who's ready to take control of their healing journey.

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