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Patient's arm is injected.

Jim Gass made sure to record the moment in an iPhone video because he’d paid tens of thousands of dollars and traveled a great distance to get there.

In the video, Gass can be seen sitting in his wheelchair in a beige hospital room. He smiles while a doctor injects something into his arm. In case there’s any question about what’s going into Gass’s vein, the doctor points to the syringe and says, “Stem cells.”

Translating into Spanish a moment later, he says, “Células madre.”

Gass traveled to Hospital Angeles in Tijuana, Mexico with the hope of recovering from a debilitating stroke. He received stem cells from Dr. Cesar Amescua based on a referral from Stemedica Cell Technologies, Inc., a San Diego company known for reportedly helping famous former athletes like hockey legend Gordie Howe make “miraculous” recoveries from strokes.

But Gass didn’t get better.

What he didn’t know, smiling in that iPhone video, was that his paralysis would get worse. Nor did he realize that his doctors back home would later find what they call...