Raquel Baldelomar at her home in Santa Monica
Like the Age of Enlightenment where intellect flourished, we have entered an Age of Awareness. With so much available knowledge, it becomes difficult to discern what knowledge will help you and what knowledge will hinder you. Newsstands are inundated with celebrity gossip, the kind of knowledge that creeps into your mind involuntarily. Even the media sources that focus on world news and current events are in constant need of deciphering and untangling, always questioning what they tell you to believe or blindly following.
Healthcare and food have become two of the most difficult topics for the average citizen to grasp. You buy a bottle of juice that promises health and vitality as well as your full serving of fruits and vegetables with the ol' FDA stamp of approval. Later you discover, after your own personal research, that same juice contains more sugar than a bottle of soda and has no nutrients whatsoever. While health and food awareness is at an all time high relative to 40 years ago, there are still forces trying to quiet the voices of change.
What of these voices in the world who have truly life-changing knowledge to share? Though challenging to find and never on the cover of US Weekly, they do exist. Raquel Baldelomar embodies healthy female ambition and entrepreneurial success in the 21st century. At thirty-five, she is the founder of Quaintise, a healthcare advertising agency based in Los Angeles. Through her work with major medical organizations across the country she is at the forefront of articulating how the healthcare landscape is shifting, and what it means for both providers and consumers.
Her new book, Sugar Crush: How to Reduce Inflammation, Reverse Nerve Damage, and Reclaim Good Health, co-authored with leading peripheral nerve surgeon Dr. Richard Jacoby, shows how inflammation from sugar creates nerve damage and how sugar-related nerve damage is the underlying cause of many modern diseases, including obesity, diabetes, gallbladder disease, cardiac disease, Alzheimer's, ALS, autism and more.
"There is a perfect storm of conditions that has created the chronic disease mess we're in today - from bad science to an industry business model that profits from disease not health. So many people in my family had been diagnosed with diabetes that I felt compelled to understand the disease better and do what I could to prevent getting it myself. Dr. Jacoby's research made it abundantly clear that our current medical system is woefully ill-equipped to prevent disease," says Raquel Baldelomar.
She began to recognize how taking charge of her own health was key to thriving in both business and life. In the previous paradigm, the medical industry made its money by treating sick people: the more sick people, the more money to be made. "Put it this way," says Baldelomar, "If I contract diabetes, I will be tied to a lifetime of medication, treatment, and interventions, and everyone but me would profit. But if I don't get sick, if I can prevent the disease, where's the profit?" That's the crux of the shift in the paradigm.
So what does this mean, exactly? Baldelomar explains that the healthcare industry is at the beginning of a major digital revolution that will change everything; from the way industry profits are made to the way consumers interact with providers. "Unlike in the old fee-for-service healthcare model, there is now real profit to be made in prevention," says Raquel. "Wearable tracking devices, virtual appointments, and at-home testing kits put important real-time health data directly into consumers' hands."
She developed Quaintise to position healthcare companies for success in this new landscape and to help consumers grasp how these changes will directly affect their lives. "We're just beginning to see how these technologies will impact how we manage our health," she says. "Just like personal computers and the internet transformed the way we do just about everything in our daily lives, digital healthcare will transform how we think about our bodies, interact with providers, make treatment decisions, and live healthier lives."
One of the many individuals who are doers and not just say-ers, Raquel Baldelomar is giving the power back to the hands of the people. Money and success are meaningless if we do not take control of our health. Join Raquel in her campaign to shift the paradigm of healthcare into a world of vitality and strength, changing the archetype of sickness for profit. In this Age of Awareness, we not only have the power to know, but the power to do.