DokitaSays – Ask Real Health Questions. Answers By Real Doctors

Do you feel embarrassed when asking questions to a doctor pertaining to your health. Many people do. Now what if you stumbled upon a site that makes it easy for you to obtain reliable answers to your health-related questions without any feelings of embarrassment?

DokitaSAYS.com allows you to ask health-related questions and get answers from real doctors. With a team of volunteer medical doctors, DokitaSAYS provides a single answer to each of the questions asked on the site.

The site which launched May 7, 2010 in beta version currently has 15 questions already asked by anonymous persons. The main aim of DokitaSAYS is to provide access to free and quality health-information that will help people everywhere live a more fulfilling life. They hope to open up a new opportunity for those that do not have access to quality health information to do so at no cost.

How DokitaSAYS works?

Ask your question in the box provided.

Volunteer Medical Doctors answer your question.

The answer is sent to you by email (for registered users only).

What’s Unique?

Unlike other sites where, an unlimited, often confusing answers are provided to questions, DokitaSAYS only provides one answer to a question. Obviously, this helps the user to make a decision instead of limping upon two or more different opinions. Besides, multiple answers to a particular question could be confusing at times. Also, DokitaSAYS helps protect your identity by asking any question anonymously. That way, you don’t feel embarrassed.

The site features user activity stream that shows questions that have been asked, popular questions, answered questions, unanswered questions, tags and a comment system that allows only login users (presumably, the volunteer doctors) to answer the questions. DokitaSAYS also features a Yoruba version. Dokita is the Yoruba word for Doctor.

In one year, DokitaSAYS hopes to have answered 1 million questions, directly and indirectly reached 10 million people, make the service available in 50 different languages, have 100,000 volunteer doctors and make a difference in the world.

The Upside

I’m not a techie-techie person but I think that DokitaSAYS is built under the Yii PHP framework. From my findings, the Yii framework is a high-performance component-based PHP framework best for developing large-scale Web applications. Yii also provides nearly every feature needed by today’s Web 2.0 application development and seems to be one of the most efficient PHP frameworks around.

The Downside

Although the site was founded by a Medical Doctor with expertise from esteemed volunteer doctors, the information provided do not take the place of a professional advice. While DokitaSAYS claims they trust the knowledge of their volunteer doctors, the answers provided does not in anyway represent a professional medical advice, counsel, diagnosis or treatment.

My thoughts

I think this is a cool service and resource centre for health-related matters. Although the site has just launched and doesn’t have any questions answered yet, it’s got huge potentials. I’m not sure whether the answers would be short and simple or in essay form like AskTheDoctor.com, but whatever the case, the fact that real doctors would provide one answer to each question is heartwarming.

Also, that questions asked would be done anonymously makes sense, since people would naturally not want to share their personal health issues in public. Granted, in order to get the right answer, the doctor needs to know you better, your allergies, your medication history and other related matters like AskTheDoctor.com that requires your personal information and medical background before you can ask a health question.

Finally, if managed well, DokitaSAYS could grow to become a great user-driven community of health-conscious people. A mobile version will be a good tool for quicker access to health information. Also, a cool directory of health centres in Nigeria browsed on the go as well as a health crisis tracking and management tool with real-time news updates on DokitaSAYS will be major hit.

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