Measuring stomach acid before the world knew how to suppress it.

1950s

Before we came along

Before our capsule, measuring stomach acid meant a rubber tube pushed through your nose and down into your stomach, someone aspirating the contents for hours, while giving you stimulant drugs by injection to force maximum acid output. It was so invasive that you couldn’t even have it done if you were a child, pregnant, or had any kind of heart condition. It was not a good time.

This was the early 1950s. To put that into context, the first heart bypass wouldn’t happen for another decade. The first ultrasound image of a fetus was still years away. Nobody had even thought of the CT scanner yet. And this was how your stomach acid was measured. Could you think of anything worse as a way to figure out your heartburn?

A young pediatrician called Hans-Günter Nöller had a knack for thinking outside the box. Where physicians of his time accepted the standard way of doing things, he saw problems worth solving. He had already published new work on a gentler method for drawing blood from infants, and turned his attention to the ghastly work of stomach acid measurement, because his own patients, children, were too young to even be considered for it. And it was not something anyone should have to go through anyway.

What if a capsule could measure it instead? Nöller partnered with Telefunken, the German electronics giant, and together they built the device we still manufacture today. A capsule small enough to swallow like a vitamin that measures pH in real time inside a living stomach. We have made improvements over the years, but the core principle has never changed.

Nöller patented the technology in 1958. What he had proven was bigger than removing the tube. He had measured something entirely new: not just whether the stomach contains acid, but how much it can actually produce when challenged. He called it Säurebildungsleistung, but we know it as acid-forming capacity.

That concept is the foundation our test still stands on today.

1960s

Crossing the Atlantic

Our capsule opened up stomach acid testing to everyone. After the footprint we left behind in Germany, we arrived in America in the 1960s. By 1969 we had appeared in the American surgical literature as a “tubeless gastric analysis.” We manufactured the capsules, sold the systems, and trained the clinicians. We have been here ever since. A Class I FDA listed medical device, on the market for over sixty years.

1977 onward

Why medicine stopped measuring

As we continued to promote the importance of stomach acid measurement, traditional medicine became, let’s say, a little distracted. The pharmaceutical industry gave doctors a way to suppress the symptom without ever having to understand the cause. And it worked. Commercially, at least.

Tagamet came first in 1977. Then Zantac. Then the proton pump inhibitors. Prilosec. Nexium. Each one more powerful than the last, each one making it easier to shut acid production down without asking why it was a problem in the first place. By the mid-2010s, more than fifteen million Americans were on chronic PPIs. The global market peaked at roughly 26 billion dollars. Studies suggest up to sixty percent of those prescriptions lacked a documented clinical indication.

Doctors stopped measuring acid. They stopped asking how much a patient was making. The question became: does the drug make the symptoms go away? If yes, keep prescribing. Gastroenterology training programs dropped gastric acid measurement from the curriculum. The diagnostic infrastructure disappeared. Traditional medicine turned its back on the underlying pathology.

But not everyone followed.

A growing community of functional medicine practitioners, integrative physicians, and naturopaths were seeing patients whose symptoms didn’t add up. If acid was the problem, why were the drugs not fixing it? They started looking the other way. Not just too much acid, but too little. And what they found changed everything. Low stomach acid carried its own set of complications: malabsorption, bacterial overgrowth, chronic bloating, reflux that got worse on medication, not better. The problem was that high and low stomach acid can produce almost identical symptoms. Without actually measuring it, there was no way to tell them apart. Our message became more important.

2009 onward

The evidence catches up

What functional medicine practitioners had been saying for decades started showing up in places the medical establishment couldn’t ignore.

Hip fractures. Magnesium depletion. C. difficile. B12 deficiency. Bacterial overgrowth. Dementia. Chronic kidney disease. All linked to long-term PPI use. The FDA issued safety communication after safety communication.

But the real bombshell came in 2009. Researchers in Denmark gave PPIs to 120 healthy volunteers who had never had reflux. Forty-four percent of them developed clinically significant heartburn after stopping the drug. The editorial that accompanied the study didn’t mince words:

Proton pump inhibitor therapy induces the symptoms it is used to treat.

Read that again.

People without reflux took PPIs and became people with reflux who needed PPIs. It was not a rare side effect. It was the pharmacology working as designed.

Our practitioners had been seeing this in their data for years. And they weren’t alone. Over 140 peer-reviewed studies have been published using our technology, at institutions including the University of Heidelberg, the University of Michigan, and UCSF, helping the broader medical community understand why measuring stomach acid matters.

Now traditional medicine is catching up too. In 2022, both the American College of Gastroenterology and the American Gastroenterological Association released updated guidelines recommending that patients on long-term PPIs be regularly reviewed and deprescribed where appropriate. Up to 82 percent of PPI prescriptions are not being used for evidence-based indications. The conversation has shifted. Doctors are being asked to take patients off these drugs. But here is the question nobody has answered yet: how do you know who actually needs them and who doesn’t without measuring their acid first?

We are the only test that can answer that question. Traditional medicine may have spent a generation looking the other way, but the science, the guidelines, and the clinical need are all pointing back in the same direction. Back to measurement. Back to us.