During a speech delivered at an alternative therapy workshop, Danielle Carr-Gomm praised the man she believed would transform her life.
‘You definitely are a messenger from God,’ she told Hongchi Xiao. As a Type 1 diabetic, she said she’d managed to reduce her insulin use by half. ‘You are starting a revolution to put the power back in the hands of the people to cure themselves… I admire you and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’
Look a little closer and the tell-tale signs of Xiao’s highly controversial ‘cure’ were there for everyone to see in her videoed testimony. The 71-year-old’s upper arms were bruised black and blue — injuries from the self-inflicted slaps the Chinese healer believed could expel toxins and treat a host of diseases.
Fast-forward three months and Mrs Carr-Gomm attended a second residential retreat held by Xiao, this time at a country house hotel in Wiltshire.
On this visit, she completely stopped taking her insulin on arrival, and by the second day was seriously unwell, crying, sweating and drooling.
Twenty-four hours later and her condition had deteriorated further still. She was vomiting, frothing at the mouth, howling in pain and seemingly delirious.
By the Thursday, Mrs Carr-Gomm was dead. What killed her? No surprises: she died of diabetic ketoacidosis — caused by a severe lack of insulin in the body.
Her decision to stop the routine injections that had kept her alive since being diagnosed decades earlier seems incomprehensible.
But the reality is that this educated mother of two truly believed she was doing the right thing — having placed her faith in the teachings of the man she called The Master.
Despite having no conventional medical training, Xiao, a former investment banker, believed that the Western approach to treating disease was ‘evil’.
He’d learned his ‘self-healing’ craft from kung fu masters in the mountains of China — a regime called paida lajin which involves patients subjecting themselves to a programme of slapping and stretching designed to expel toxins and stimulate the body’s energy flow.
Not for the faint-hearted, adherents were advised to hit themselves for up to six hours a day.
‘Slapping thoroughly from head to toe, including the head, neck, face, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, breasts, armpits, groin, belly, buttocks, the back and the entire spine, etc., brings even more amazing healing effect,’ Xiao advised, describing the sound of slapping as ‘music’. These blows were supposed to leave marks and bruises and could be administered with hands, sticks, shoes — or even using a £20 hand-shaped tool on offer from Xiao’s website.
As for the stretching, that took place on purpose-made tables designed to target tendons. Sandbags and weights could be attached to limbs to exert extra force.
Xiao claimed paida lajin could be used to cure a host of illnesses — everything from bad breath to diabetes. He saw insulin as ‘poison’, and at that second workshop in Wiltshire in October 2016 was said to have congratulated Mrs Carr-Gomm for stopping her injections.
Even when her condition deteriorated it caused little alarm. Dismissed as a ‘healing crisis’, he told the other 30 participants that she was experiencing the ‘darkness before dawn breaks’.
That the sun never rose again on Mrs Carr-Gomm should have come as no surprise to Xiao.
Because despite what she claimed in her earlier videoed testimony, she had fallen seriously ill at that first retreat as well, only recovering when she began taking insulin again.
More shocking still, the previous year, a six-year-old boy with diabetes died at a workshop in . His parents having stopped his insulin, allegedly at Xiao’s instruction, he started vomiting before having a seizure and dying.
Xiao was convicted of the child’s manslaughter in 2019 and jailed. He was extradited to the UK in 2023 to stand trial over Mrs Carr-Gomm’s death.
During a three-week trial at Winchester Crown Court, the 61-year-old was accused of knowingly ignoring the consequences of Mrs Carr-Gomm stopping taking her insulin and using his ‘influence’ over her.
In his defence, he denied having a duty of care over the pensioner, claiming he made it ‘absolutely clear’ he was not medically trained. He also denied telling her to suddenly stop taking her insulin.
But after deliberating for 19 hours, the jury yesterday found him guilty of manslaughter.
Like so many who fall foul of charlatans and snake-oil salesmen, Mrs Carr-Gomm was vulnerable because she was desperate.
Born in France, aged 21 she moved to London and met her first husband Richard Carr-Gomm. Having set up a successful travel business, the couple began developing properties.
Their two sons, Matthew and Lawrence, were privately-educated and the family travelled extensively. Mrs Carr-Gomm developed an interest in alternative medicine and spirituality but was said to have been heartbroken by the breakdown of her marriage in 1989.
She would briefly marry for a second time, before dividing her time between Bulgaria and Lewes, East Sussex.
In 1999 she was diagnosed with diabetes and initially took her insulin in tablet form.
‘She had a fear of needles,’ Matthew Carr-Gomm told the court in a statement, adding that his mother was also an ‘obsessive vegetarian’. While most insulin is laboratory-made, it can be sourced from animals.
In 2016 she was told by friends about a forthcoming paida lajin workshop in Bulgaria.
‘She said that Hongchi Xiao assured her she would be in good hands and diabetes would be something he could help with,’ said her son. ‘She said slapping helps get toxins out of the blood.’ This came ‘out of the blue’ to him and his brother, both of whom were ‘sceptical’.
They were right to have their doubts. Born in China the son of a doctor and electrical engineer, Xiao moved to the U.S. in 1980 where he obtained citizenship and an MBA from the University of Arizona.
Work followed on the New York Stock Exchange and in Hong Kong as an investment banker. Success brought with it a large house in Orange County, California, as well as two daughters from successive marriages.
But in the mid-2000s, Xiao became interested in Chinese medicine having seen his older brother emerge from conventional hospital treatment for a fever, as he put it, ‘mentally retarded’. Encouraged by a chance meeting with a monk who told him he was destined to study in the monasteries of rural China, he went to work alongside healers, hermits and kung fu masters, before opening a clinic in Beijing.
Two books that he claims sold more than a million copies quickly followed. In Paida Lajin Self-Healing he explained the belief that all diseases are caused by blocked energy channels in the body, which can be cleared with slaps and stretches, like an ‘anti-virus software’.
Nor was Xiao shy in the claims he made for the therapy. He referred to testimonials from people around the world who claimed it had relieved everything from cancer to depression and diabetes.
As well as books and a website, Xiao ran workshops around the world. In April 2015 one of these residential workshops took him to Sydney. Among those attending was six-year-old diabetic Aidan Fenton.
Details of how Xiao told the boy’s parents to stop giving him insulin were outlined to the jury in the trial of Mrs Carr-Gomm.
Confronted by the boy’s mother when Aidan began vomiting yellow and black liquid and being so weak he had to be pushed in a pram on the fifth day, Xiao told her: ‘Is the detox. All the bad stuff come from — come out from his body, his organ. It’s just part of self-healing body adjustment.’
Four days later, the boy had a seizure. Staff tried to help but he was motionless. Xiao was also said to be present and began ‘slapping the boy’s inner elbows’. The boy was found to have died as a result of diabetic ketoacidosis.
Incredibly, Xiao continued to tour the world giving workshops.
One of these was held in Bulgaria in July 2016 where Mrs Carr-Gomm was in attendance — and stopped taking her insulin before becoming very unwell and having to be persuaded to start taking it again.
Yet, the following October, Mrs Carr returned to a second workshop, this time at Cleeve House in Seend, Wiltshire. Teresa Hayes, a chef at the retreat, described Mrs Carr-Gomm telling the group she was diabetic and had not taken insulin and felt ‘fine’ and ‘happy’. Asked how Xiao responded, Ms Hayes said: ‘He said ‘well done’ and ‘that’s good’. He said that personally to her.’
Over the coming days she heard crying coming from Mrs Carr-Gomm’s bedroom, and entered to find her pale, sweating and drooling as she cried on the bed.
Walking past the room on the third night she heard ‘slapping noises, crying, yelling’.
‘The slapping noises sounded the same as the paida slapping method that the attendees had been taking part in the entire time,’ she said.
In the early hours of October 20, Ms Hayes was called urgently to come to Mrs Carr-Gomm’s room. ‘She was completely still, all the colour had drained from her face,’ she said. ‘I knew the minute I saw her that she had died.’
Paramedics were called at 2.54am. A senior NHS consultant told the court that if emergency services had been alerted three hours earlier, she would have had a 90 per cent chance of survival.
The prosecution argued that no one was ‘better placed’ than Xiao to make sure Mrs Carr-Gomm received the medical care that could have saved her.
Following her death, Xiao continued to tour the world. But in May 2017, on arriving in London he was arrested and extradited to where he was convicted of manslaughter. In November 2023 he was then extradited from to the UK and charged with Mrs Carr-Gomm’s manslaughter.
Following the verdict, head of the Crown Prosecution Service special crime division, Rosemary Ainslie, said: ‘Hongchi Xiao knew the consequences of Danielle Carr-Gomm’s decision to stop taking insulin could be fatal; he had seen it before.
‘Hongchi Xiao was the man in charge, yet he failed to respond to Mrs Carr-Gomm’s worsening condition with tragic consequences.
‘His failure to take reasonable steps to help Mrs Carr-Gomm substantially contributed to her death and amounted to gross negligence.’
In a statement issued on behalf of Mrs Carr-Gomm’s family, her son Matthew said: ‘We welcome the decision and commend the jury and judicial process in the UK for recognising Hongchi Xiao for the complete fraud that he is.
‘While we cannot bring our mother back, we hope this case at least highlights the dangers of pursuing unregulated alternative therapies without proper research.
‘Our mother’s motivation was to live, and had she not been deceived by this man, whom she trusted to care for her, she would not have knowingly risked her life in such a manner.
‘However, it is disappointing that two other individuals in the UK who promoted, organised the bookings and financially managed the event in Wiltshire have not been brought to justice or been held accountable.
‘We are deeply upset and feel let down that such a reckless event was allowed to take place, and these other responsible persons have escaped without consequences.
‘As a family, we now look forward to moving on.’
Xiao will be sentenced on October 1.