Monday, June 30, 2008

What it takes to fund research.

Conducting research of any kind is expensive. If you have ever been hospitalized, had a baby, or had medical lab tests of any sort, think of how costly it was. Fortunately you mostly likely had insurance to cover most of the costs but think about the portion that was yours and you may have lamented about paying.

When medical research is needed to make advancements such as finding a way to stop NF tumors from growing, there is no insurance to help flip the bill. All of the money comes from compassionate and giving donors and is desperately needed as funding a promising research project is not cheap. First of all, there are the researcher salaries that need to be covered for which minimum wage is not going to cut it. Then you have the cost of all the research and medical supplies such as petri dishes, test tubes, and machinery like centrifuges. Finally you get to the part of all the testing (which takes years and is under hard scrutiny to be approved). There are outside labs and researchers that must be paid to analyze the results. Basically in a nut shell, these type of projects take a sizable amount of money. A research project cannot even be considered without offering a sizeable grant in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If NF is not a well known disorder such as breast cancer, diabetes, AIDS, MS, MD, Leukemia, cancer in general, and many others, those of us in the NF community depend on the support of the people we know. We depend on you to also help us gain the support of people we don't know by having you tell your friends, coworkers, acquaintances, and family to gain their monetary sponsorship as well. If you truely cannot afford to contribute, you can greatly help by collecting donations for NF toward your friend or family member's efforts or by hosting a fundraiser yourself.

This is how many of the large nonprofit groups we know about got started. They had the support of friends and family who encouraged the people they knew to also support the cause and it kept growing and growing by the more people they reached out to. However, those organizations would not be as large or influential as they are today without the committed support of friends and family.

If 30 people asked only 4 of their friends to donate the minimum donation amount of $25 I have recieved, that would equate to $100 raised by each of those friends and family making a total contribution of $3000 to my cause! Wow! That is really immense....from zero dollars to $3000 just like that! If I could get this kind of support, we would be much closer to reaching the mission to finding a promising treatment to stop these tumors from growing and requiring repetitive risky surgeries. Mostly importantly, we would find a way to stop these tumors from wreaking the havoc they cause.

Please click the sponsor me button in the left column to make a donation now and seriously and emphatically find at least 4 friends to make a donation too.

NF causes deafness, visual impairment, cataracts, blindness, disfigurement, loss of balance function and mobility, paralysis, difficulty eating and swallowing, dry eyes due to disruption of tear production, dizziness and nausea, vertigo, trigeminal neuralgia pain to the face and jaw, neuralgia pain to the extremities, numbness sensation to the fingertips, muscle weakness leaving some people unable to type, write, or even sign, cognitive difficulties, memory loss, concentration challenges, difficulty reading, learning disabilities, bone deformalities and in some cases the tumors can develop into cancer. The causes of all these problems are from tumors which grow in the brain, spinal cord, and on any nerves in the body.

Please help us to stop these tumors by supporting us with a donation to fund the necessary research. My sincere thanks to you!

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