Healthysparx is Australia’s Quora for Health Problems

Healthysparx is a new web app that makes it easy to find answers to your health and medical questions.

With a minimalist but attractive interface, Healthysparx allows users to post and answer questions, earning points for their answers. Users can “respark” an answer, which uses a retweet-style icon but seems to have more to do with lending an answer credibility from the community.

There’s a “Bonus” tab, where keen users can earn double points for answering questions that haven’t yet received a response, or have otherwise been selected as double points questions.

Much like Quora, users can follow both users and topics. The interface is snappier and cleaner than Quora’s, although in some cases a bit more inline documentation would help the app’s cause.

Healthysparx was founded by a husband and wife team from Tasmania in Australia: Corinne Mirkazemi, a pharamacist and nutritionist, and her husband Arman Mirkazemi, a web developer.

Of course, with all crowdsourced information one needs to take reasonable steps to verify before taking potentially dangerous actions. But Healthysparx has greater potential than sites like Quora in this area: as a health-focused service, it will attract a community of more dedicated health professionals than Quora, willing to give you the next best thing to a consultation when the doctor’s office is closed and you’re a new parent trying to figure out what to do about colic.