Włodzimierz Piątkowski

The article seeks to characterize and interpret the “Kashpirovsky phenomenon”, which was part of the context of the first stage of the system transformation (1990–1993).The extent of the popularity of this healer and his ‘health sessions’ was a kind of challenge to medical sociologists (the ‘teletherapy’ was watched by 59% of adult Poles).The text shows changes in the picture of typical civilization diseases taking place against the backdrop of rapid, deep and radical social changes bringing with them a number of severely felt stressors at the time. It also describes the method used to analyze two collections of personal documents/letters/addressed to TVP (Polish Television) by viewers of Kashpirovsky’s programs; in the first stage there 1907 documents of this type, and 1311 in the second. The obtained results made it possible to discern the types and effects of somatic and psychosomatic changes described by the viewers (positive or negative), to register the types of diseases (ailments) that viewers expected to be cured, to interpret popular, commonsense knowledge about health and disease, inter alia: ‘lay etiological concepts’, ‘presumed causal relationships’ between their own illness and Kashpirovsky’s methods, and to describe thaumaturgic phenomena caused, in the opinion of the authors of the letters, by the healer, etc.

This text is the effort of having a look at the system transformation and inequalities in health cused by it from the perspective of Eliot Freidson’s theory. The author wants to show the makrosocial process and their costs from the ordinary people’s point of view. The empirical material will be the fragments of letters sent to TVP program II by the viewers systematically watching the programs of non conventional therapist A.M. Kaszpirowski. This kind of personal documents among others gives the possibility of subjective experiencing the financial difficulties in the first phase of transformation, registration of impressions connected with the trauma of the “big change”, finally allowes to follow the examples of new thinking about the social and economic problems: increase of civil activity, autocreative and innovative attitudes.