An alternative healer failed to get medical help as a 71-year-old diabetic woman lay dying while attending a workshop he led which “evangelised” a slapping therapy as an alternative to life-saving insulin medication, a court has heard.
Mr 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.”He said: “She became extremely unwell, starting to vomit and became hard to reason with.“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.
“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.” He described how Mrs Carr-Gomm became “increasingly and seriously unwell” and by the second day she “could be heard crying and yelling whilst laying on her bed”.
“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.