Sonia Olea Coontz, of Long Beach, California, was one of those patients. Now 36, Coontz had a stroke in May 2011. She enrolled in the Stanford trial after finding out about it during an online search.

One is driven to wonder why, as we spend billions of dollars on healthcare, often a patient's best alternative is to do their own (free) research.

When my uncle was diagnosed with brain cancer, my grandfather spent hundreds of hours reading medical journals and looking for as many low-chance, high-risk studies and treatment plans as possible. He turned up many options my uncle's family had no idea about. That should not have been his job.