Ever wished that visiting a doctor was as easy as sending a text message?

An in-person consultation will always be best for some ailments, but sometimes it isn’t feasible. A San Francisco start-up, Truth on Call, has rolled out a service that lets people text questions to physicians, then collects the answers.

It’s not cheap — $50 to get a reply from one doctor, with the responding doctor receiving 10 and the rest covering text messaging fees and payment to Truth on Call.  And they foresee the uses as going far beyond just patient and doctor. The New York Times has more:

Truth On Call taps into the phenomenon that differentiates Twitter from other online communication tools — the ability to ask a question of a broad, unknown audience and see what comes back. Some doctors, for example, have used Twitter to pose questions about a perplexing case and get responses from doctors they do not know.

“Information is being exchanged very, very quickly in people’s personal and professional lives, but health care has yet to tap into the feed,” said Rosina Samadani, who founded the company. “This is a way for folks to get answers from thousands of physicians within minutes or hours.”

Dr. Samadani — who has been a health care consultant for 12 years at McKinsey and Capella Advisors, a firm she started — hopes to eventually use Truth On Call to connect doctors in developing countries with those in the United States. Someone in rural India, for example, could get real-time advice about a patient from a group of doctors in the United States….

Reporters have asked doctors about their views on the health care bill, for example, or queried neurosurgeons on whether they limit their own cellphone usage because of concern about effects on the brain.

A pharmaceutical company has asked gynecologists whether a competitor’s ad has affected which birth control pill they prescribe, and a financial firm considering an acquisition of a company that makes a gastroparesis drug asked intensive care doctors how pressing an issue gastroparesis was.