An alternative healer who promoted a “slapping therapy” taken up by millions of people across the world has been found guilty of the gross negligence manslaughter of a British woman who died at one of his workshops

Danielle Carr-Gomm, 71, who had type 1 diabetes, fell fatally ill in 2016 after she stopped taking her insulin and fasted during a paida lajin therapy retreat run by Hongchi Xiao at a country house in Wiltshire

The prosecution claimed Xiao, 61, who is addressed as “master” by his followers, was in charge of the workshop and had a duty of care towards Carr-Gomm

They said he was grossly negligent by failing to take reasonable steps to encourage her to take insulin and to summon medical help when it was clearly required. When she became seriously ill, crying in pain and weakening, Xiao blamed her decline on a “healing crisis”[…]
The prosecution said Xiao should have been fully aware of the danger Carr-Gomm was in because the year before a six-year-old boy with type 1 diabetes had died at a workshop he ran in Australia after Xiao had told his mother to stop giving him insulin. Xiao was convicted of gross negligence manslaughter over the boy’s death in 2019 and jailed[…]
Xiao, who was born in China, said he had quit a lucrative career in finance to focus on paida lajin and was not in it to make money. He said the technique, which involves slapping and stretching, was easy to learn, helped tackle every disease known to humans, and reduced the need for patients to take “western” medicine with “poisonous” side-effects[…]
Xiao said the deaths of the boy in Australia and Carr-Gomm had led to paida lajin being “demonised” and he suggested it had deliberately been discredited by “western doctors” and alternative practitioners because it put them out of work