HONG KONG: As riot police fought anti-government demonstrators on the streets of Hong Kong over the weekend, two photos popped into the encrypted inbox of a group of volunteer medics who call themselves the “Hidden Clinic.”
The images showed the nastily swollen left arm of a 22-year-old protester who had been beaten and were accompanied by a message from the sender that said, “I suspect his bone is broken.”
After exchanges through the night via the Telegram messaging app that arranged an off-the-books X-ray, the protester was diagnosed with a displaced fracture of the ulnar bone.
With Hong Kong’s summer of protests now stretching into the fall and clashes becoming increasingly ferocious, medical professionals have quietly banded together to form the Hidden Clinic and other networks to secretly treat the injuries of many young demonstrators who fear arrest if they go to government hospitals.
The person who messaged the network on the injured protester’s behalf later explained the youth’s wariness by saying, “Many of his friends have been detained when seeing doctors.”
The Hidden Clinic says it has clandestinely treated 300 to 400 protesters with an array of injuries: broken and dislocated bones, gaping wounds and exposure to tear gas so prolonged that they were coughing up blood.
It also says the severity of the injuries has increased sharply in the past week, with hard-core protesters and police increasingly tough on each other.
A practitioner who specializes in traditional Chinese medicine and is not affiliated with Hidden Clinic says she alone has treated 60 to 80 patients, some with multiple wounds from tear-gas canisters and other riot-control projectiles.
The woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she fears reprisal during her frequent trips to the mainland, uses acupuncture to ease their pain and doesn’t charge for her services.
This behind-the-scenes doctoring, outside of government hospitals, suggests that the official toll of 1,235 injured protesters treated in public hospitals since June 9 significantly undercounts both the number and full extent of those hurt in the more than 400 demonstrations tallied by the government.
Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, says the casualty count includes injuries to more than 300 police officers.
The government tally, compiled by the Hospital Authority, only counts patients who visited 18 public Accident and Emergency departments in the territory of 7.5 million people, not those treated privately.
The protests were triggered in June by a now-abandoned measure that would have allowed criminal suspects to be extradited for trial in Communist Party-controlled courts in mainland China.
They’ve flared into sustained fury against Lam’s government, testing commitments from Communist leaders in Beijing not to interfere in the internal affairs of Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous hub for international trade and finance that reverted to Chinese rule in 1997.
AP
