A Canadian healthcare service firm is making itself stand out from the crowd by its willingness to show support for three of the most popular dog meme cryptocurrencies: Dogecoin ($DOGE), Shiba Inu ($SHIB), and Floki Inu ($FLOKI).
“Ask The Doctor” is a Canadian healthcare services company headquartered in Toronoto. Its original purpose was just to provide health and medical information (in a similar way to WebMD). Currently, via its partner firms, it provides the following services:
- telemedicine consults
- covid-19 tests
- travel medical insurance
- dental procedures
- cosmetic procedures
- physio, chiro, and massage treatments
Prakash Chand is a Co-Founder of Ask The Doctor, as well as its Chairman and CEO. He also seems to be a huge advocate for crypto. In fact, in April 2016, HuffPost spoke to Chand, as well as Dr. Michael Warner, who was the Chief Medical Officer at the time, about the firm’s acceptance of crypto (Bitcoin and five other cryptocurrencies) as a means of payment.
When they were asked why the firm had started accepting Bitcoin, Warner replied:
“In the realm of healthcare, most consider the foundation of patient privacy as restricting access to the content of the doctor-patient interaction. In digital health, securing the content of such interactions is absolutely necessary but may not offer certain patients the level of privacy they require. Our customers share with us privileged and sensitive information. Until we added Bitcoin, our services had to be purchased using a Credit Card or Paypal. To some, having a banking paper trail documenting a transaction with “Ask The Doctor” did not provide them with a sufficient level of privacy.
“The other reason to offer payment through Bitcoin is to maximize accessibility to our services. Credit cards are not universally available. In some cultures, women do not have the same financial freedom as men to obtain them. Two-thirds of our customers are women and we have customers in every country in the developing world. Our overall goal is democratize access to health care, and offering Bitcoin is consistent with this goal.“
As for the the question of what was the firm’s vision, Chand said:
“Our goal is to replace users using Google and WebMD for medical advice. At the end of the day nobody can give a better answer to your medical question than a trained General Physician and/or Specialist.“
Now, le’s come back to November 2021.
On November 14, Ask The Docotor announced on Twitter that support for Dogecoin was coming in the next few weeks.
They used this tweet from Dogecoin Co-Creator Billy Markus to explain why they had decided to accept Dogecoin:
Initially, they were reluctant to offer support for other dog meme cryptocurrencies that did not have their own blockchain:
And for the next few days, it continued to advocate for $DOGE and to explain what services clients would be able to pay for using $DOGE:
Next, they announced that $DOGE would be accepted as a means of payment from Monday (November 22).
Yesterday (November 23), Ask The Doctor conducted a Twitter poll to find out which other Dogecoin-inspired cryptoassets they should be supporting.
A couple of hours later, they announced that the next dog meme cryptocurrency to be accepted would be $FLOKI.
And finally, a few hours later, realizing that $SHIB was getting more votes than $FLOKI in their poll, Ask The Doctor announced that they would soon be offering support also for $SHIB.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
