In the late 1980s, millions of Soviet people sat in front of their televisions and waited for one man to speak. He was sitting in a television studio, while his audience could be hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. There was no doctor's office between them, no medical equipment and no medicine. There was simply a television screen, a voice and Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a Soviet psychotherapist who claimed that he could influence a person's condition from a distance.

Kashpirovsky did not begin his career as a television healer. He graduated from Vinnytsia Medical Institute in 1962 and spent many years working as a psychotherapist. He spoke in interviews about treating thousands of patients and about his experience with hypnosis. Before he became famous across the USSR, he was simply a doctor working in psychotherapy, and then television changed all of that.

On March 31, 1988, a Moscow-Kyiv television link showed something that seemed extraordinary to Soviet viewers. A patient in a Kyiv clinic was undergoing surgery while Kashpirovsky was in a Moscow studio. The operation was performed without conventional general anesthesia, with psychological influence being used for pain control.

Kashpirovsky later referred to this case many times as evidence of the possibilities of psychotherapy. For someone watching at home, the situation was difficult to forget. A doctor was sitting in another city, a patient was lying on an operating table, and the only connection between them was a television broadcast.

Another major experiment took place on March 2, 1989, during a Kyiv-Tbilisi television link. Two surgical operations were carried out in Tbilisi while Kashpirovsky worked from Kyiv. One patient had an incision of about 25 centimeters, the other about 40. Both operations were performed without conventional general anesthesia, with pain control again associated with psychotherapeutic influence.

These operations really happened, but they did not prove that a television could cure diseases. Hypnosis and suggestion can affect how people experience pain and anxiety, and they can influence some physiological responses. That is very different from treating a tumor, an infection or another physical disease simply by watching a television program.

By the autumn of 1989, Kashpirovsky had his own programs on Central Television. Six famous sessions were broadcast. He sat almost motionless, looked directly into the camera and spoke slowly, giving viewers instructions to relax and concentrate on the screen.

People watched in huge numbers. Families gathered around the television, relatives called each other about the programs, and some viewers even put water or medicine in front of the screen, believing that the broadcast could somehow affect them. His phrase "I give you the setting!" quickly became part of everyday Soviet speech.

Viewers described all kinds of sensations during the sessions: warmth in their hands, tingling, heaviness, sleepiness or changes in pain. Such experiences can be real without requiring anything supernatural. Suggestion can change a person's attention, emotional state and perception of physical symptoms. If someone expects to feel better, anxiety can decrease, muscles can relax and unpleasant sensations can become less noticeable.

Pain is especially sensitive to this kind of effect. A person can genuinely feel relief even when the underlying cause of the pain remains. Feeling better and being cured are two different things.

Kashpirovsky's claims went much further than pain relief. His sessions became associated with treating high blood pressure, ulcers, neuroses, chronic illnesses and other health problems. Some of these claims came from viewers themselves, while others were made by Kashpirovsky. There was no scientific evidence that television suggestion could treat such a wide range of physical diseases.

At the same time, Kashpirovsky was far from the only unusual figure appearing on Soviet television at the time. The late 1980s saw a rapid rise in psychics, healers and people claiming that they could influence health without conventional medical treatment.

The best-known was Allan Chumak, who claimed that he could "charge" water, creams and other objects through television. Juna promoted her own methods of treatment and influence. Newspapers and television programs were suddenly filled with psychics, parapsychologists and healers.

They did not all explain what they were doing in the same way. Kashpirovsky emphasized his medical training and work as a psychotherapist. Chumak spoke about energy. Others talked about bifields, extrasensory abilities and forces that science had supposedly not yet discovered.

Soviet doctors had their own concerns about this new television phenomenon. The problem was the enormous audience. A doctor working with a patient personally could examine them, consider their diagnosis and medical history, and take contraindications into account. A television session could reach millions of people with completely different conditions.

The greatest danger came when someone treated a television session as a replacement for medical care. A person might genuinely feel better after watching Kashpirovsky, yet the underlying disease could still be there. Someone could postpone an examination or stop taking prescribed treatment because they believed the television session had already helped them.

Why did so many people take it seriously?

Television had enormous authority in the Soviet Union. For decades, viewers had seen doctors, scientists, cosmonauts and government officials speaking from the same screen. Kashpirovsky also had something that made him especially convincing: he really was a doctor. He had medical education, years of work as a psychotherapist and the televised surgical experiments behind him.

For many viewers, that was enough to make the boundary between medicine and something much more unusual difficult to see.

His story therefore became a mixture of several things that were easy to confuse. The psychotherapy behind it was genuine, and so was the effect of suggestion on pain and anxiety. The televised operations happened exactly as described, and millions of viewers reported strong physical and emotional reactions afterward. Only one part of the story stood on different ground: the claim that television itself could treat a wide range of diseases.

Kashpirovsky continued appearing in public after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Recordings of his old sessions were copied onto videotapes and later appeared on the internet. The famous image of the man sitting silently in front of the camera survived long after Soviet Central Television disappeared.

The technology changed, too. A television screen became a computer screen and then a phone. Millions of people can now watch a health influencer, online expert, psychologist or alternative healer from anywhere in the world. The audience can be even larger than Kashpirovsky's was.

But the basic situation is surprisingly familiar. Someone appears on a screen, speaks with confidence and tells thousands or millions of people what they should do with their health. The viewer has to decide where the useful advice ends and the promise of something that has never been properly proven begins.

In 1989, Soviet families sat around their televisions waiting for Kashpirovsky to speak. A few felt real relief. Plenty felt nothing at all. And more than a few walked away convinced they'd just watched a miracle.

For many people who lived through those years, the phrase "I give you the setting!" is still enough to bring back the atmosphere of late Soviet television.