‘Slapping therapy’ healer failed to get help for dying diabetic woman, court hears

An alternative healer failed to get help for a woman with diabetes who lay dying after taking part in his “slapping therapy” workshop at a British country house, a jury has been told.

Hongchi Xiao, a champion of paida lajin therapy, in which patients are slapped or slap themselves to expel “poisonous waste”, should have sought urgent medical assistance after Danielle Carr-Gomm stopped taking insulin and fell seriously ill, the court heard.

The jury at Winchester crown court was told that Carr-Gomm was heard howling in pain but Xiao, 61, of Cloudbreak, California, did not call for help and she died of diabetic ketoacidosis in October 2016.

Xiao denies the manslaughter by gross negligence of Carr-Gomm, 71, from Lewes, East Sussex.

The court heard that Xiao had been convicted of manslaughter in Australia after a six-year-old boy with type 1 diabetes stopped taking insulin under his instruction and died during a workshop about 17 months before Carr-Gomm’s death.

Duncan Atkinson KC, prosecuting, said Carr-Gomm first attended one of Xiao’s workshops in Bulgaria in July 2016. She was an “obsessive vegetarian” and had a fear of needles, so she did not like injecting insulin and as a result had “tried every kind of alternative therapy”, he said.

The jury was told that paida lajin means “slap and stretch” and was considered a method of self-healing in which waste was expelled from the body through repeatedly patting and slapping parts of the body.

At the workshop in Bulgaria, Xiao allegedly assured Carr-Gomm that he could help her with her diabetes and she stopped taking insulin, but she was eventually given it when she became extremely unwell.

She attended Xiao’s paida lajin course at Cleeve House in Wiltshire in October 2016.

Atkinson said: “Whilst at the workshop, to Xiao’s knowledge and with his approbation if not encouragement, Carr-Gomm stopped taking her insulin. She announced this on the first day and had been congratulated by the defendant when she did so.

“The defendant knew the consequences of such a decision. He knew that Mrs Carr-Gomm was risking death. He chose to congratulate a diabetic who stopped injecting, rather than to persuade them not to take so grievous a risk to their life.”

Atkinson said that after Carr-Gomm stopped taking her insulin and, like the other participants, started to fast, she exhibited clear signs of being seriously unwell.

He said: “On the second day of the workshop, Mrs Carr-Gomm was heard to be crying and yelling whilst laying on her bed. She started to vomit, in a way similar to that which followed her withdrawal from insulin in Bulgaria.

“On day three she was vomiting, tired and weak, and by the evening she was howling in paid and unable to respond to questions.”

He said others on the course misinterpreted Carr-Gomm’s condition as “a healing crisis”.

The prosecutor said: “The defendant was involved in Mrs Carr-Gomm’s care. He had repeated opportunities to see and advise her. But there is no evidence that he took the opportunity to tell her to take her insulin. He had, but did not take, repeated opportunities to call for medical assistance.

“In that period of increasing danger, the medical evidence is that Carr-Gomm’s life could have been saved if medical aid was called.”

He continued: “By the time medical aid was finally called on day four, 20 October, however, it was too late and Danielle Carr-Gomm died of diabetic ketoacidosis as a direct result of the decision to stop taking her insulin injections.

“That decision was taken in the context of Mrs Carr-Gomm’s exposure to the evangelism, the confident belief, of this defendant that insulin was a poison and that paida lajin represented an alternative.”

The prosecutor said Xiao had been an exponent of paida lajin for 10 years and had written a book on it. He said: “He does not have medical qualifications or training.”

The trial continues.