With long-term injuries now an unfortunate feature of every top-level match, there are countless examples of players defying medical opinion to get back on the pitch quicker than anyone expected.

Yet Tom Hudson’s comeback is remarkable by any standard. For 2½ years, Hudson, then an academy player at Leicester, battled a chronic groin and abductor issue that left him unable to sit let alone run. He saw more than 10 specialists and surgeons until he retired aged just 19.

In November, Hudson, now 23, made his Premiership debut for Gloucester. Hudson can provide a brief overview of all this in about a minute but to extract more detail of his retirement and return takes the best part of an hour. There are still parts of his story that he cannot explain. All he knows for sure is that he owes the resumption of his career to a Malaysian doctor called Master Chia who used non-invasive electromagnetic acupuncture to fix an injury that some of the finest medical minds in Europe could not.

Hudson’s problem began innocuously enough in a pre-season match against Cardiff Blues in 2012 when he was tackled in the back. After that he lost a lot of feeling in his left leg and groin. Leicester spared no expense in their attempts to diagnose the issue but as soon as one problem was solved, another flared up. He even saw Dr Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, who has previously used calves’ blood to treat Usain Bolt. Nothing worked.