Rogue B.C. acupuncturist's unlicensed needlework captured by hidden camera

The young woman with the severe eczema had undergone acupuncture before.

But something felt different about the two needles Wai Cheong Chik inserted in her back as she lay on a treatment table in the rogue acupuncturist's home in Richmond, B.C., a suburb just south of Vancouver, last March.

"I explained to him that they were more painful than the other injection sites," the woman wrote in a B.C. Supreme Court affidavit filed as part of an effort to close Chik's contraband clinic.

"Mr. Chik explained he was 'twisting the needles,' and that is why I was in pain with respect to those two sites. At the time, I believed Mr. Chik, but I still felt unsettled by his answer."

Despite her misgivings, the woman would return for more treatments — but not without a surreptitiously placed cellphone camera to make a record of Chik's nefarious needlework.

The video she captured was part of a body of evidence that convinced a B.C. Supreme Court judge last week to find Chik in contempt of court for violating a 2016 order banning the 74-year-old from the unauthorized practice of acupuncture. 

Justice H. William Veenstra's ruling is the latest chapter in a years-long battle between Chik and B.C.'s College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Acupuncturists.

In 2019, a similar attempt to have him found in contempt failed despite months of surveillance of Chik visiting residences with a bag believed to contain acupuncture supplies and searches which turned up thousands of needles, blister packs and electrical stimulators.

The judge, at that point, said the college lacked direct evidence from a patient.

Chik applied for registration with the regulator in 2000 but was rejected.

According to an affidavit filed as part of earlier proceedings, he claimed he studied medicine and acupuncture in China, where he worked as a doctor in a government hospital until he escaped to Canada in 1989 following the Tiananmen Square massacre.

He claimed to have worked full-time six days a week as a kitchen helper at a Vancouver Thai restaurant until 2014.

"In my spare time, which was limited, I began helping friends and their friends with Chinese traditional medicine and acupuncture," he wrote.

A judge granted a permanent injunction preventing Chik from practicing acupuncture in June 2016, but within months, the college had already received an anonymous tip that he was flouting the order, visiting "numerous private residences, sometimes carrying a black Nike bag."