Founded in December 2018, the Complementary & Alternative Medicines Platform (CAMP) has just launched its beta version.
With 100+ practitioners already enlisted, from nutritionists to reiki healers and osteopaths to yoga instructors, users will be able to book appointments online and receive nutritional product recommendations from these professionals. The accompanying e-commerce platform is set to go live within a year.
CAMP is working to secure a crowdfunding investment by June this year, launch into the US by October and file for an initial public offering (IPO) by 2025.
Stress, pressure and information overload
Antoine Sepulchre, founder and CEO of CAMP, said the platform would help shift current healthcare towards a more preventative approach, simplifying access to alternative medicine options.
“The vision is really, in two words, to make the world a healthier place,” Sepulchre told NutraIngredients.
“Human beings have never been submitted to so much stress, pressure and information than we are today, so I think we need help and something that is also very accessible.”
He said CAMP would educate people about available complementary and alternative therapies and interventions – targeting physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health – and encouraging people to take“a more holistic approach towards their health”.
The platform, for example, would feature the likes of reiki practitioners; Chinese Medicine specialists; osteopaths; yoga teachers; massage therapists; nutritionists; and meditation instructors, each with individual profile pages about their practice. He said users could search practitioners either through sub-categories, geographical location or via a search on a specific health issue or disease.
“We will be working with a kind of pre-payment, comparing to Air BnB, where users will then book and directly pay online.”
But what about nutrition?
Sepulchre said CAMP's integrated e-commerce platform for dietary supplements and functional products, set for launch in January 2020, would add a hugely important layer to the offering.
“Sometimes when you go to a practitioner and they recommend products, it can be difficult and time-consuming to follow-up,” he said. But through CAMP, users would have product recommendations sent to them via a link that they simply validate to receive the products.
Having this professional guidance was “much better” than trying to self-medicate, he said, although CAMP would still offer the option to directly purchase products from the site. The idea was for the e-commerce section to function a bit like Amazon, he said, with 'most popular' products based on user feedback listed first. Eventually, CAMP would provide the possibility for brands to 'ping' products to the top, like on Google, with clear messaging it was a paid-for promotion.
For brands and manufacturers, Sepulchre said the platform offered a “huge database of people” interested in purchasing very specific nutritional products.
“I deeply believe that when you start to look at yourself and want to have a healthier life, it will be very surprising that at some point you don't start to look at your nutrition, because it's the base of everything.”
This is the future...
Sepulchre said the platform represented the direction healthcare had to go in, which was also backed up by the World Health Organization (WHO) with its program to develop CAMP practices and make healthcare more accessible by 2025.
He said the CAMP team would attend next year's World Economic Forum in Davos to present the concept to members of government and major companies in nutrition and healthcare and convince them this complementary and alternative medicine was the future; a movement.
By 2025, he said mental health would become “the first world health problem”, backdropped by a glum environmental outlook.
“I mean, you hear about it every day – 'save the planet' – and people are now trying to reconnect with themselves and take care of themselves, because what's happening to the planet is just a reflection of the way we treat ourselves and the way we've been treated by all major industries for years. People of course care about the planet but they are also starting to think more about what they're doing and where we're going.”