Rick Pescatore, D.O.

Physician, editor, and founder working on the problems medicine sets aside.

I am a board-certified emergency physician, the Editor-in-Chief of Emergency Medicine News, and the founder of BellyMD, a gut-brain health company in Philadelphia.

United States Naval Academy · U.S. Navy submarine force · Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine · Cooper University Hospital · American Board of Emergency Medicine

Rick Pescatore, D.O.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dr. Rick’s Picks

A weekly note from an ER doctor.

One clinical practice, one paper, one product, and one person worth your attention. Written by me, free, and paired with a new video each week.

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Current work

BellyMD

After years of seeing patients with disabling gut symptoms and normal workups, I started a company to take those conditions seriously. BellyMD builds tools and therapeutics for disorders of gut-brain interaction.

MeNome: the three-minute check-in
belly-md.com

Emergency Medicine News

I edit the leading independent news publication in emergency medicine, published by Wolters Kluwer. Before that I wrote its monthly evidence column, What to D.O.

Read EMN

Clinical practice

I continue to work clinically in community emergency departments in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and I advise on numerous efforts supporting emergency physicians in evidence-informed bedside practice.

Full background
Disorders of gut-brain interaction affect roughly forty percent of adults. Most of those patients have normal imaging, normal labs, and a long record of being told that nothing is wrong.
Why I work on the gut-brain axis

Take the three-minute check-in

Work with me directly

Years of symptoms deserve more than eleven seconds.

Eleven seconds is the median time a patient speaks before the first interruption. I open a small number of private video consultations each month built on the opposite premise: your story, read closely before we ever speak, then explained in plain language.

The full consultation Thirty minutes$500
  • Your whole story, heard all the way through
  • Intake read before we speak
  • Written recap within two business days
  • A question list to bring to your own clinicians
Reserve the full consultation The focused session Fifteen minutes$275
  • One question, named when you book
  • Intake read before we speak
  • A straight answer in plain language
Reserve a focused session

Video, from any country, in your time zone. Six of each session open per month. Full refund any time before your session.

Educational sessions, not medical visits. No diagnosis, no prescriptions, and no doctor-patient relationship; your own clinicians stay in charge. Interruption data: J Gen Intern Med, 2019.

Selected writing

All writing

In the press

I have appeared on PoliticKING with Larry King, MSNBC, and CNN, and my public health work in Delaware was covered by U.S. News & World Report and Business Insider. I co-hosted the EMN Live podcast. More than thirty peer-reviewed publications are indexed on PubMed.

Media and press materials

Contact

For press, speaking, and editorial inquiries:

I read everything, and I reply to most of it.