Questions people ask
People search my name with a question attached. These are the ones that come up most, answered plainly.
- Is Rick Pescatore a real doctor?
- Why is so much of your content about thiamine?
- What was your role with the White House COVID-19 Task Force?
- What is BellyMD?
- How do I reach you?
Is Rick Pescatore a real doctor?
Yes. I am a board-certified emergency physician, certified by the American Board of Emergency Medicine and licensed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. I earned my D.O. at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2014 and completed my emergency medicine residency at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, where I served as chief resident. I was the first emergency physician to become a diplomate of the American Interventional Headache Society.
Before medicine I studied aerospace engineering at the United States Naval Academy and served in the Navy’s nuclear submarine community. I continue to practice emergency medicine. I am the Editor-in-Chief of Emergency Medicine News, the leading independent news publication in the specialty, published by Wolters Kluwer, and the founder and CEO of BellyMD. The full record is on the About page.
Why is so much of your content about thiamine?
Because thiamine deficiency is one of the most consequential blind spots in modern medicine, and I have watched it from the bedside for a decade. Thiamine, vitamin B1, is the cofactor that lets the body turn carbohydrate into usable energy, and the brain, the heart, and the gut are the first organs to fail without it. Long-term acid suppression, bariatric surgery, heavy alcohol use, and chronic vomiting all drain it, and the obesity medicine societies now list it as a nutrient of concern for people on GLP-1 drugs.
Emergency departments see the consequences daily and test for it rarely. It is cheap to measure and cheap to replace, and the people who need it most are the ones medicine has already told that nothing is wrong. The evidence is strong, the fix is simple, and almost no one with emergency medicine training is talking about it. So I do.
What was your role with the White House COVID-19 Task Force?
In February 2020, weeks before Delaware’s first case, I became Chief Physician of the state’s Division of Public Health and directed its clinical response to COVID-19 from the first case forward: testing operations that reached millions, a contact tracing corps of more than two hundred, and the outbreak response inside the state’s poultry plants that U.S. News & World Report covered.
Out of that work came Test-to-Stay, a school testing strategy I co-designed that became one of only two the CDC endorsed. I advised the White House COVID-19 Task Force on taking it national, and we published the results in Public Health in 2022. I appeared on CNN and MSNBC throughout that period. The appearances are listed on the Media page.
What is BellyMD?
BellyMD is the gut-brain health company my wife, Kady, and I founded in Philadelphia. Disorders of gut-brain interaction affect roughly forty percent of adults, and most of them have normal scans, normal labs, and a discharge paper that says nothing is wrong. BellyMD exists for them.
It makes MGB+, three formulas built around magnesium glycinate and vitamin B1 derivatives; MeNome, an app that decodes gut-brain symptom patterns; and private consultations with me. The science, the formulas, and the app are at belly-md.com.
How do I reach you?
Press, speaking, and media: rick@belly-md.com. Private consultations are booked through BellyMD.
Last updated October 2026