If you’ve been told your tests are normal and your symptoms are just stress — you’re not imagining it.
Medicine just hasn’t built the right tools to see what you’re experiencing. Yet.
BellyMD exists because too many people are living with real, patterned, measurable symptoms that the current system consistently fails to name. We’re building for them.
Our app, MeNome, is coming soon. Join the waitlist.
You're in!
We’ll let you know when MeNome is ready.
Please enter a valid email address.
Dr. Rick Pescatore, D.O.
Where It Started
I kept seeing patients medicine couldn’t explain.
In emergency medicine, you develop an instinct for patterns. I kept encountering patients with chronic nausea, abdominal pain, gut symptoms that would come and go, normal labs, normal scans — and lives being quietly taken apart. The standard workup said nothing was wrong. The patients knew otherwise.
The gut and brain don’t operate as separate organs. They’re one signaling system. And that system can be dysregulated in ways that look invisible on a typical workup but are very real in a person’s daily life.
The more I looked, the more a particular lens kept emerging: the way nutrient-dependent metabolism — especially thiamine and related pathways — might be playing a role that medicine was almost entirely overlooking.
The Moment It Became Personal
On a drive to Pittsburgh, theory became real.
Rick had been explaining his theory for hours — the gut-brain axis, thiamine, metabolic disruption, why so many patients were being misread by the system. And somewhere on that drive, I realized he was describing my mother.
She had been living with symptoms that had been dismissed, minimized, cycled through specialists who disagreed with each other. Watching her navigate a system that kept saying “nothing is wrong” while her quality of life eroded — that experience never fully left me.
When she became seriously ill, Rick helped from afar: guiding me on what to ask, how to push back, what the system was missing. That experience made the company feel less like a startup and more like an obligation.
We built BellyMD because patients — especially people whose suffering isn’t easily measured — deserve tools that take them seriously.
Kady Pescatore, JD
"They were arguing about who deserved credit — while the entire premise was wrong."
In 1886, The Lancet published a letter disputing who deserved credit for discovering “the microorganism” that causes beriberi. The debate was heated, authoritative, and entirely beside the point.
There is no microorganism that causes beriberi. The real cause — thiamine deficiency — was hiding in plain sight while the medical establishment argued over the wrong question entirely.
We think about that a lot.
This is not ancient history. It is a reminder.
Our Science
The framework behind everything we do.
Not settled dogma. Our best current model — rigorously held, openly explored.
The Gut-Brain System
The gut and brain are not separate organs — they’re one signaling network. Chronic digestive suffering often reflects a systems-level dysregulation: enteric nervous system, autonomic tone, stress signaling, metabolism, motility, and more. Treating the gut alone misses the picture.
Pattern Over Snapshot
Standard medicine takes snapshots — a lab, a scan, a single visit. Chronic gut-brain illness lives in patterns: how symptoms flare, recover, cluster, and shift over time. We believe that longitudinal data — from real people, tracked in real life — is one of the most underused tools in medicine.
Thiamine & Overlooked Metabolism
Thiamine and related neurometabolic pathways may be far more relevant to chronic gut-brain disorders than conventional medicine recognizes. This isn’t a ‘one deficiency explains everything’ claim. It’s a hypothesis — supported by emerging evidence — that metabolic disruption in high-demand nervous system tissues may affect nausea, motility, dysautonomia, and flare behavior in ways that don’t show up on standard panels.
We are rigorous about what we know. And equally rigorous about what we don’t.
Who We Are
A physician and a lawyer who decided to build.
Rick Pescatore, DO
"I built the clinical and scientific architecture. The framework, the formulas, the theory of what medicine was missing."
Board-Certified Emergency Physician · Fellowship Trained · Editor-in-Chief—Emergency Medicine News · G-PACT Board Member · Developer—MGB+ Protocol · Founder—BellyMD
Kady Pescatore, JD
"I built the bridge between what Rick understood clinically and what patients needed to hear. Legal training taught me precision. Personal experience taught me why it matters."
JD · Co-Founder—BellyMD · Communications & Narrative Strategy · Patient Advocacy
Clinical Advisory Team
The Physicians Behind the Formula
Dr. Sergey Motov
Pain Management Advisor
Emergency physician and national leader in non-opioid pain management.
Dr. Patrick Reeves
DGBI Specialist
Gastroenterologist specializing in disorders of gut-brain interaction.
Dr. Joshua Niforatos, MTS
Research & EBM Advisor
Emergency physician and evidence-based medicine researcher.
Dr. Javier Figueroa, PhD
Metabolic Support Advisor
Physician-scientist focused on metabolic and mitochondrial pathways.
Our Principles
What guides every decision we make.
"Patients are not imagining it."
Chronic gut-brain symptoms are real, measurable, and patterned — even when standard tests come back normal.
"Patterns are data."
How symptoms flare, cluster, and shift over time tells a story that a single lab draw never could.
"Humility is scientific."
We hold our hypotheses rigorously — and we’re transparent about what remains unproven.
"Medicine has blind spots — and so do we."
Progress requires admitting what we don’t yet know. We build in that spirit.
Find out where your pattern fits.
The pattern quiz takes two minutes. It’s free. And it’s the fastest way to understand which formula — if any — reflects what your gut-brain system is doing.
No account required. No email needed.