Treat Gastroparesis In St. Petersburg, FL

You do not have to fly to a national center for advanced gastroparesis treatment. Dr. Grandhige treats gastroparesis from South Tampa, a short drive across the Gandy or Howard Frankland Bridge, and St. Petersburg is one of the areas his patients regularly come from.

He focuses on one part of the body: the esophagus, diaphragm, and stomach. Gastroparesis sits squarely in that focus. For patients coming from St. Petersburg and the rest of Pinellas County, his office coordinates testing so that any study that can be done closer to your home is done there, and the trip to Tampa stays short. That planning is part of why out-of-area patients choose the practice instead of starting over somewhere new.

G-POEM is an incision-free procedure done through the mouth that widens the pylorus, the muscular valve at the stomach’s outlet, so the stomach can empty more easily. Using a flexible endoscope, Dr. Grandhige creates a small tunnel under the pyloric muscle and divides that muscle with an endoscopic knife. There are no external incisions on your abdomen. He is one of a handful of surgeons performing this procedure in the Tampa Bay area.

Good candidates share a clear profile. Under the 2025 AGA guideline, that generally means a 4-hour study showing at least a moderate delay (about 20 percent or more of the meal still in the stomach at four hours), at least 6 to 12 months of moderate symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, or fullness after meals, and diet and medication already tried. Testing decides candidacy, not symptoms alone.

Be clear about the limits. G-POEM is not a first step, not a cure, and not right for everyone. Patients with severe weight loss or malnutrition may need nutritional support first, and some are better served by a different approach. Dr. Grandhige will tell you plainly when a procedure is unlikely to help, and he reviews the expected recovery with each patient before scheduling anything.

In gastroparesis care, the decision of whether and how to treat matters as much as the procedure itself. Dr. Grandhige works inside the foregut every day, and that focus changes the judgment behind every recommendation.

He is a board-certified general surgeon, a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, a member of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, and a founding member of the American Foregut Society. He trained at Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan, and Yale, and he has treated the full range of foregut conditions, from GERD and hiatal hernias to achalasia and gastroparesis, for more than 16 years. Across his reflux work he has performed more than 600 fundoplications, more than 600 LINX procedures, and more than 200 TIF procedures, which is the kind of volume that builds real pattern recognition. You can read his full background on the about the practice page.

Two things set the practice apart on safety. He performs every surgery at one hospital, HCA South Tampa, with the same operating-room team and his own physician assistant on each case, so the people around you know the procedure cold. And he is known among referring physicians for telling patients when surgery will not help, which is the opposite of a practice built on volume.