Singapore’s traditional Chinese medicine clinics see rise in patients with serious pandemic side effects
- Unlike Hong Kong, Singapore does not use TCM to treat Covid-19. But people are nevertheless seeking out practitioners to help manage their well-being
- Issues include domestic abuse, anxiety, posture problems and even erectile dysfunction, which one practitioner attributes to more sex – and cycling
When Wong asked the patient for details, he found her story inconsistent. It fed his suspicions that she might have been domestically abused.
“There is a distinct difference between the types of sprains, bruises and injuries caused by falling, compared to injuries caused by intentional physical harm,” said Wong, who has a degree in both TCM and Western medicine.
Wong has been seeing more patients with injuries that seem to stem from physical abuse in the past two years amid the Covid-19 pandemic. He said he would see one such patient every few months before 2020 but this had now increased to at least one a month, most of them women.
His observations come as Singapore, along with many other countries worldwide, has experienced a rise in domestic abuse cases during the pandemic.
Social workers say victims and abusers have been forced to spend more time together due to lockdowns, while family tensions over the likes of work, finances and caregiving duties have also risen.
According to the Singapore police force, when a “circuit breaker” partial lockdown was imposed in the city state in April 2020, there was a 22 per cent increase in family violence cases. In Hong Kong, police statistics show the number of child abuse cases in the first nine months of 2021 jumped by two-thirds compared to the same period in 2020.