So you’ve got eye floaters and you’re desperate for a cure, then you hear about Vision Degrading Myodesopsia or VDM Project and its quest for a cure for vitreous eye floaters, awesome you think then you discover that they’re asking for donations towards their efforts to find a solution and you suddenly get alarm bells ringing in your head and you wonder, is this just an elaborate scam to get money off of me? In this blog post, I’m going to explore the work of the VDM Project and why I’m choosing to support their efforts.
As you may have figured out by now, I don’t believe that the VDM project and its research is a scam, that’s because I’ve had the opportunity to talk to and be able to meet some of the team and people that are involved in the project and bringing it to life. The project has been funded by Fabio, who has been busy assembling a team of passionate individuals from all walks of life and from all around the world with one thing in common, and that is that they are all vitreous eye floaters sufferers and they all want to come together to bring a solution to life. I’ve met a number of these individuals and I’ve heard their floater’s stories which have proved to be both powerful and inspiring.
So let’s get into what the project and its objectives are all about, why I think it’s worth your attention. I’m going to bring this post down into the following sections.
- First of all, what’s unique about the VDM Project?
- The power of the crowd,
- The plan, where they are now, is a cure realistic,
- Should you support it now?
The VDM Project could easily be a group of people, a group of sufferer that comes together to complain, to feel sorry for themselves, and frankly not achieve much at all, but I think the key unique thing about the project is that led by Fabio, they’ve gone out to collaborate with an eye specialist in the form of Dr. Jerry Sebag. I think this is a significant and important move towards their bold goal of finding a non-surgical cure for vitreous eye floaters or at the very least, a safer surgical alternative for vitreous eye floaters. The reason is that Dr. Sebag is an experienced ophthalmologist and a vitreo-retinal surgeon, but he also does head up a not-for-profit organization called the VMR Research Foundation.
VMR stands for Vitreous Macular Retina, which is the key areas that the foundation works in, for what I can see, the foundation is very well connected to a lot of universities, institutions that are all doing the kind of work that will be necessary to support the foundation in a non-financial capacity.
So it’s a unique opportunity that I think the VDM Project has established to partner with Dr. Sebag and the VMR research foundation, so this means it’s not just the community gathering together to talk, but instead real action can come out of the project.
At this point, you might be wondering what does VDM even means?
Well, it stands for Vision Degrading Myodesopsia. This is a term that I believe has been coined by Dr. Sebag himself to distinguish the difference between regular myodesopsia, which is the medical name for eye floaters, and what he is calling a vision degrading myodesopsia.
Dr. Sabag believes that clinically significant floaters that cause degrading of your vision is actually a real disease and this is important because not all floaters cause vision degradation, but if one does and it can be linked to a disease process, then we can study that process with the hope of curing the disease, much in the same way that we would do many other diseases and this would also make it a lot easier for big pharmaceutical backing to be established or even government funding to speed up this work.
Now, the VDM Project has taken up the challenge of bringing in people and experts together to find an acceptable cure for eye floaters, because there just doesn’t appear to be the necessary big pharmaceutical support or interest for treatment in the pipeline. Now, Dr. Sebag runs the VMR Research Foundation, as not for profit organization, and they’re constantly fundraising themselves for the work that they’re doing.
So how does the VDM Project expect to be able to fund and support the work of Dr. Sebag for the desired solution?
Well, if you dig deep enough into the VDM website, you’ll find and understand that they’re actively seeking donations to bring their vision to life and if you think about it, it’s no different really to crowdfunding the research. Many of us who have given money to a crowdfunding campaign at some point in recent years. The reality is if people who stand to benefit from the research don’t invest financially in it, it may never get done. The guys at the VDM Project, however, have been creative enough to look at other methods of funding, in April 2020, I believe they secured about $10,000 of monthly online advertising free from Google after jumping through the necessary hoops and proving their not for profit status, as well as also proving that the doing is much needed.
So what’s the plan?
I mean, nobody wants to throw their hard-earned money at a project that doesn’t have a plan, well, firstly, as the name suggests, the VDM project is just that a project that means it’s a work in progress and that means that you should be clear that treatment or cure will not be available overnight or possibly even very soon. There are four initial stages of their broader plan that I’ll cover in the following steps, these are outlined on their website as well and here is the link to VDM website; Project website: https://www.vdmresearch.org
Phase 1 is the launch of their website, vdmresearch.org, and also their plan to reach 10,000 people via their newsletter, so this is all about gathering a mass of people who feel that the work that they’re doing will be beneficial to them and that they have an interest in the success of the project.
Below is the link to the newsletter, you can check that out for yourself and I think is certainly worth signing up, there’s nothing to lose, nothing to pay for and you’ll get a document with which highlights the research that they are kind of working on and some of their thinking and strategies about their approach to being able to find a solution.
Research plan page: https://www.vdmresearch.org/eye-float…
Phase 2 is to help the VMR Research Foundation with a specific research project, and this is described on the website as well. For more details, and here is the link;
VDM Project website: https://www.vdmresearch.org
However, the Vitreous Macular Retina Research Foundation, to give it its full name, has three main objectives here and they’re currently working on this and they have a monthly funding goal to be able to establish these three steps.
- So the first step is to discover the cause of eye floaters, which they believe will help them to be able to, in the short term, discover a cure and in the longer term, to be able to prevent vitreous floaters.
- So the second objective is to discover the link between myopia and eye floaters.
- Thirdly is to create and distribute a new type of questionnaire to help them accurately measure the negative impact the eye floaters have on people in a way that reproduces data that can be analysed and measured.
Phase 3 of the VDM Project plan is to create a huge pressure group to influence pharmaceutical companies and to get support from institutions as well.
And finally, Phase 4 is to develop a better treatment approach for eye floaters and to focus on prevention as well.
So that’s the broad plan, and it’s ambitious, to say the least, but there is an actual plan based on action and attached to an actual research capable foundation. As we speak I believe that right now they are in phase two and perhaps early-stage phase three with a lot of work still needing to be done and actual research as well still needing to be done.
So as I said earlier, this is a project and work in progress that will be helped with more people getting on board for more updates on their progress, do check out the website and it’s also worth checking out the YouTube channel of Cormack on the channel called Cure Eye Floaters, Natural Remedies, And Solutions. He’s a member of the team and he’s certainly clued up on the progress of the project.
I think it’s a reasonable question to ask and from an optometrist point of view, and even from what I know of the ophthalmology and vision research community, people are generally quite closed off to the possibility of there being a non-surgical treatment for vitreous eye floaters, full stop.
However, in my relatively short time of making videos about floaters on YouTube, I discovered that there is a lot of research that needs to be done and perhaps some forgotten scientific thinking about the vitreous as well that could ultimately lead to a breakthrough. Now, the reality, though, is that we’ll never know unless someone actually does the research and Dr. Sebag is certainly someone that appears to have all the necessary expertise, interest and I hope that a cure or a better treatment is possible for vitreous eye floaters, that alone, in my eyes, is a reason to be hopeful. I quote the recent VDM Project review video produced by James over at the world of eye floaters channel and I suggest you go and check out his video for his take on things if you haven’t done so already and this is the link to that as well.
Dr Jerry Sebag: https://www.vdmresearch.org/dr-j-seba…
He did raise some interesting questions that I imagine some of you may have about the project as well, so one of them was really around the support and how you support the project financially, what’s gonna be done with all the money that people are given and how long will it take to arrive at a treatment and a cure for vitreous eye floaters? Now, from what I can understand in terms of how long it may take for treatment to arrive, I think it’s a long way off, especially when I hear that they’re still needing to develop ways to image the vitreous better because generally the research hasn’t been done into better imaging techniques for the vitreous. Currently, ultrasound is the best way of doing that but they are looking at developing ways of using the O.C.T. scanning device to be able to look at the vitreous as well.
However, I think that people have to accept this and allow the process to take place, I do think that with the right funding, things can move along a lot faster and I believe that advanced level phase 3 of the plan that I outlined from the VDM Project’s objectives should at least be the focus for anyone choosing to support the VDM Project and the VMR Research Foundation financially. If the project can raise enough support financially and by kind of mass community support via the newsletter Facebook communities, whatever the case may be, then it may be possible for Dr. Sebag’s VMR Research Foundation to get huge funding from institutions or big pharmaceutical companies, that will then mean that they need less crowdfunding money from individuals and they can make a lot faster progress.
I must say, I don’t get anything out of supporting the project or making these blog post at all, but I do know that there are many great people involved in this project, and I do feel that it’s a credible attempt to bring people together to get a solution to a very big problem that many people are living through.
Well, I’m not going to flat out recommend you go out and donate to the project without thinking about it, I would suggest that if you are an eye floater sufferer and is making your life miserable and you want a solution, then there’s no harm in checking out the website, signing up to the newsletter, and if you do end up donating, then I would suggest that you do so knowing that what you’re doing is supporting the project up until it can hopefully stand on its own two feet.
Also, if floaters sufferers who are often crying out for help, don’t support it. You need to ask yourself the question, why would anybody else support it?
Leave me a comment, do you think the VDM Project is a good idea?
Thanks and I look forward to catching you guys in the next one.
Take care.
