An ‘alternative healer’ is in court after failing to help a diabetic woman who lay dying at a ‘slapping therapy’ workshop.
Danielle Carr-Gomm, 71, died on the fourth day of the alternative healing retreat at Cleeve House in Seend, Wiltshire in October 2016.
A warrant for the arrest of class leader Hongchi Xiao was issued three years later and the 61-year-old is now on trial having been charged with manslaughter by gross negligence.
Danielle, from Lewes in East Sussex, had been looking for alternatives to taking insulin for her type 1 diabetes due to being vegetarian and scared of needles.
She first sought help from Xiao, 61, in Bulgaria in July 2016. He ‘evangelised’ Paida Lajin therapy as a replacement for insulin, the court heard.
Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson said: ‘It is said to be a method of self-healing in which “poisonous waste” is expelled from the body through patting and slapping parts of the body.’
Danielle completed the workshop in Bulgaria and stopped taking her insulin, but she became ‘extremely unwell, started vomiting and became hard to reason with’, Mr Atkinson said.
She had to be persuaded to start taking insulin again, and she then recovered.
Mr Atkinson said: ‘The defendant was present, spoke to her about taking insulin, and was in a position to see the effects on Mrs Carr-Gomm both of her ceasing to take her insulin and of restarting the injections.’
Danielle then went to Xiao’s workshop in Wiltshire three months later and again stopped taking her diabetes medication and became ill.
Mr Atkinson said she died on the fourth day of the retreat after Xiao failed to call for help, saying: ‘He knew that Mrs Carr-Gomm was risking death, and he knew that he had an influence over her decision.
‘In short, therefore he chose to congratulate a diabetic who stopped injecting, rather than to persuade them not to take so grievous a risk to their life.’
Danielle became increasingly unwell, and by the second day of the retreat she could be heard ‘crying and yelling’ while laying in bed, was ‘vomiting, tired and weak’ by the third day, and she was moved from her bed to a mattress on the floor because she fell out of bed.
‘Those who had received and accepted the defendant’s teachings misinterpreted Mrs Carr-Gomm’s condition as a healing crisis,’ Mr Atkinson said.
‘In that period of increasing danger, the medical evidence is that Mrs Carr-Gomm’s life could have been saved if medical aid was called.
‘By the time that such medical aid was finally called on day four, October 20, 2016, it was too late, and Danielle Carr-Gomm had 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 poison and that Paida Lajin represented an alternative, an alternative which she sought, to injecting insulin.
‘The defendant knew at first hand that it did not represent such an alternative, but rather it carried with it an obvious and serious risk of death.
‘He assumed a position of leadership and control over Mrs Carr-Gomm and her care as she declined and died, and he owed her a duty, which he failed to meet, to help and care for her.’
Mr Atkinson told the jury that Xiao had already been prosecuted for manslaughter after a six-year-old boy died in 2015.
The boy had stopped taking insulin after his parents took him to the ‘alternative therapy’.
Xiao does not have medical qualifications or training, Mr Atkinson added, and said he was an ‘exponent’ of Paida Lajin for 10 years and had written a book about it.
Xiao denies manslaughter and the trial continues.
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