Digestion Relief: Answers After the Gastroenterologist

If you’ve already had testing, bring it. I’ll read anything from the past three to six months and tell you what’s missing rather than starting you over.

Two of these have their own page. Read more about IBS and SIBO treatment and read more about food sensitivity testing.

Getting your food back

This is the part I care about most, and it’s where I differ most sharply from how this usually goes.

Food is not fuel. It’s your mother’s recipe, it’s the table at a birthday, it’s the reason you go to that restaurant with your friends. When digestion goes wrong, you don’t just lose comfort. You lose the pleasure, the spontaneity, and eventually the social life, because it’s easier to decline than to explain.

And the standard path makes that worse. Cut out gluten. Then dairy. Then FODMAPs. Then nightshades. Each round narrows your world, and none of it tells you why. I’ve met women eating twelve foods who were still symptomatic and now afraid of the twelve.

Restriction is a diagnostic tool, not a treatment. We remove things temporarily to learn something. Then we fix what we learned about, and then we put food back.

So the plan runs in this order:

Find the cause. Testing first, so we’re removing the right things rather than everything.

Treat it. Overgrowth, dysbiosis, parasites, low digestive capacity, barrier repair, motility. Whatever your results actually show.

Rebuild capacity. Nutrients that repair the lining, support for acid and enzymes, and the raw materials your gut needs to function on its own.

Put food back, deliberately. One at a time, tracked, so you learn what your body genuinely can’t handle versus what it couldn’t handle when it was inflamed. Those are usually very different lists, and the second one shrinks.

Live with it gracefully. Knowing what to do when you overdo it, because you will, and that’s fine.

I’d add one thing. If eating has become frightening, if you’re anxious before meals or your world has narrowed to a handful of safe foods, that’s a real consequence of what you’ve been through and it deserves attention too. Getting your food back is partly physical and partly rebuilding trust in your own body, and I take the second part as seriously as the first.

What I use

An integrative approach, which in practice means I’m not limited to one toolkit.

Dietary modification that leaves you a life. Targeted to your results and time-limited by design, with reintroduction built in from the start. Not a permanent list of prohibitions.

Botanical therapy. Herbal antimicrobials for overgrowth and dysbiosis, plus botanicals for motility, spasm, and inflammation. This is where naturopathic training earns its place, because there’s real depth here that most conventional practices simply don’t have access to.

Nutrients that rebuild the lining. Amino acids, minerals, and specific compounds that support the gut barrier and the tissue itself, chosen from your labs rather than a shelf.

Digestive support. Enzymes, acid support, and bile support where testing shows you need them, which is more often than people assume.

Targeted probiotic and prebiotic strategy. Which strains, when, and sometimes deliberately not yet, because probiotics in the wrong order can make an overgrowth worse.

Antifungal support where yeast is part of the picture, guided by testing rather than assumed.

Prescription options where they’re the right tool. I’m not ideological about this. If a prescription is what your situation calls for, that’s what I’ll recommend.

The rest of your body. Hormones, thyroid, cortisol, and inflammation, because they drive digestion and get ignored in a purely gut-focused workup.

Already seen a gastroenterologist?

Most of the women I treat have, and I work alongside that rather than in competition with it.

A gastroenterologist looks for structural disease and performs the procedures that find it. That work matters and I’m glad you had it done, because knowing you don’t have a tumor is information you needed.

What usually happens next is the gap. Nothing structural was found, so there’s nothing to treat within that framework, and you’re sent home with a functional diagnosis and general advice. Not because anyone failed you. Because functional digestion is a different question requiring different testing.

That’s the question I answer. Overgrowth, dysbiosis, yeast, parasites, barrier integrity, digestive capacity, absorption, motility, and food reactivity. All testable, all treatable, and none of it visible on a scope.

And because gut inflammation so often shows up on the skin, read more about the gut and skin connection if rosacea, acne, or eczema is part of your picture. If your digestion changed on the same timeline as everything else in your forties, read more about hormone testing.

And if you have a diagnosed condition, I co-manage it with you. Inflammatory bowel disease, including ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s, is treated in an integrative setting here: nutrition built from your own testing, nutrient repletion, inflammatory and microbiome support, and the food reactivity that so often sits alongside it. Your gastroenterologist handles pharmaceutical management and the monitoring that needs their equipment. Neither of us is doing the other’s job, and you get more than either approach alone. 

Where I’ll send you for imaging or scoping, because that’s equipment rather than expertise: if a question needs a colonoscopy, an endoscopy, or imaging to answer it, that happens elsewhere and I’ll get you there. Then we keep working.

Symptoms I want evaluated 

I’d rather say this plainly than have you wait.

Blood in your stool, black stools, unexplained weight loss, trouble swallowing, persistent vomiting, iron deficiency anemia without a clear cause, symptoms that wake you from sleep, a fever alongside your symptoms, or a family history of colon cancer. Also colon cancer screening if you’re over 45 and haven’t had it.

I’ll tell you if that’s you and make sure it happens, because starting treatment around an unanswered question is how something gets missed.

And one specific thing worth knowing before you change anything. If you haven’t been tested for celiac disease and you’re considering going gluten-free, get tested first. Celiac testing requires that you’re still eating gluten, so going gluten-free first can cost you a clear answer for months. If screening is positive, gastroenterology performs the confirming endoscopy and I handle the dietary work from there.

GI specialist near me: why women in the East Bay come here

Almost everyone I treat for this has been somewhere first. The full workup, the clean result, the shrinking food list, and years of being told to manage their stress.

What’s different here:

• I test function, not just structure. SIBO, dysbiosis, parasites, barrier integrity, digestive capacity, and absorption. The questions a colonoscopy isn’t designed to answer.

• Restriction is temporary and diagnostic. The goal is a wider diet than you have now, not a narrower one.

• You get your food back. That’s the actual objective, and I’ll say it out loud because nobody else seems to.

• I look outside your gut, at hormones, thyroid, and inflammation, because digestion changing in your forties is rarely a coincidence.

• Real depth in botanical and nutritional therapy, with prescription options when those are the better tool.

• I can co-manage with your gastroenterologist, including inflammatory bowel disease, so you’re not choosing between approaches.

• An award winning doctor with fifteen years of practice in the East Bay. I’ve been voted Best Doctor of the East Bay, and I have page after page of five star reviews that show how hard I work for my patients, including many for exactly this.

I’m in Lafayette, CA, easy to reach from Walnut Creek, Orinda, Moraga, Danville, Alamo, Pleasant Hill, and the broader East Bay.