Digestive Health Consulting & Assessment
Find the root cause of your symptoms.
Gut Rest Diagnostics is a telehealth-first digestive health consulting practice. We bring careful, diagnostic-grade assessment and a clear, personalized plan — so you can finally understand what your gut is telling you and start feeling like yourself again.
Does this sound like you?
Symptoms that point deeper.
If you've been told it's "just IBS," cycled through diets and antibiotics, or never gotten a real answer — these patterns are worth a closer, data-driven look.
Bloating & pressure after meals
Uncomfortably full on small portions, with upper-abdominal pressure that won't pass.
Reflux, burping & heartburn
Burning in the chest or throat, sour taste, often worse at night or lying down.
SIBO that won't resolve
Treated, but the bloating and gas keep coming back — and you sense something deeper is being missed.
Unpredictable bowels
Swinging between constipation and loose stools, urgency, or a sense of incomplete emptying.
Undigested food in stool
Visible food particles — a sign of poor breakdown, often linked to stomach acid or enzymes.
Fatigue, nausea & cravings
Tired after rest, brain fog, post-meal nausea, and intense cravings for quick energy.
These patterns often trace back to low stomach acid, microbial imbalance, or impaired digestion at the root. We help identify what's actually driving them — with objective assessment, so you can stop guessing.
Why symptoms mislead
The same symptoms can have opposite causes.
Bloating, reflux, discomfort after eating — these are how the gut signals that something is off. But the signal is rarely specific. Too much acid and too little acid can produce nearly identical symptoms, which is why treating what you feel, without measuring what's happening underneath, so often misses.
Opposite problems, identical symptoms
Low stomach acid and high stomach acid can feel the same from the outside — the same burning, the same fullness. A symptom describes your experience, not the mechanism behind it. Two people with the same complaint can need opposite approaches.
Imbalance is usually layered
Long-standing gut issues are rarely one clean problem. When one part of digestion falters, the body adapts around it — recruiting other mechanisms to keep absorbing nutrients. Over years, those adaptations stack on top of each other until the original cause sits buried beneath everything built to compensate for it.
The work is in the unraveling
Getting to the root means separating the original problem from the compensations layered over it. That takes measurement and a structured look at how your digestion actually behaves — not a symptom checklist. It's the difference between managing a symptom and understanding it.
A deep-dive consultation is built to do exactly this — explore how your digestion behaves and trace your symptoms back to their root, layer by layer.
How it worksWhat guides the practice
Focused on digestive health — and the full picture behind your symptoms.
For more than a decade, Dr. Erdman's work has centered on digestion: clinical training, ongoing research, and close attention to each person's full history and data. The result is a practice built on substance, not shortcuts.
More than a decade of focus
Years devoted to understanding digestion and walking alongside the people living with it.
Trained at King's College London
MBBS, 2011 — a foundation in medicine that informs every conversation.
Grounded in research
First-author, peer-reviewed work with Dr. Farshid Rahbar, MD.
How it works
A structured path, remote-first.
Most of the work happens by video, wherever you are. In-person assessment is available in California by advance arrangement.
Case review
You share your symptoms, labs, and history before we meet.
Consultation
A thorough 60–75 minute video session to map your case.
Assessment
Targeted testing — at-home kits or in-person — when the data will change the plan.
Structured plan
A clear, individualized protocol built around what the data shows.
Follow-up
We refine as you respond — you're never left guessing the next step.
The Heidelberg pH assessment
See your stomach acid in real time.
For more than sixty years, the Heidelberg pH Capsule has done something remarkable: measured stomach acid directly, as it happens. You swallow a tiny wireless capsule, and it reports your intragastric pH continuously. A standardized bicarbonate challenge then shows how quickly and strongly your stomach restores its acidity — an objective picture that's genuinely hard to get any other way.
It's a technology Dr. Erdman cares about deeply — so much so that he serves as CEO of Heidelberg Medical, the company that makes it. That means the assessment in your plan comes with an unusual depth of familiarity: how the system works, what it measures, and how to read what it shows.
- Real-time data, measured directly
- No blood, stool, or guesswork
- Decades of clinical use behind it
The Heidelberg pH Capsule is a Class I, 510(k)-exempt, preamendments device, classified under 21 CFR §876.1400. It supports assessment of gastric acidity and aids in the evaluation of hypochlorhydria, achlorhydria, and hyperchlorhydria.
The acid threshold
Function follows pH.
Drag the scale. Each job of stomach acid holds across a range of pH, then falls away as the stomach loses its acidity.
Illustrative thresholds drawn from published gastric physiology. For education, not diagnosis.
Meet Dr. Erdman
Dr. Michael D. Erdman, MBBS
Dr. Erdman holds an MBBS from King's College London and has spent more than a decade following a single passion — digestive health, and the real difference that clear answers can make in someone's life.
He believes so much of how we feel begins in the gut, and that with patience, close listening, and the right data, people can find their way back to feeling well. He's the first author of peer-reviewed research with Dr. Farshid Rahbar, MD, a co-author on national presentations in functional gastroenterology, and the CEO of Heidelberg Medical — but what he loves most is simply helping people understand their bodies and feel better.
Start here
Let's unlock what's behind your symptoms.
A discovery call is a relaxed, no-pressure way to talk through what you've been experiencing and see whether we're a good fit. Remote anywhere; in-person in California by advance arrangement.