This book proposes a new way to look at illness through an exploration of the radical but ultimately logical idea that illness is a physical response to a past emotional trauma. It then takes the discussion further by exploring the idea that the extant illness can be either a result of a person's own trauma, or of a trauma experienced by an ancestor and passed down in familial genetic code or epigenetic organization. This construct is called biological decoding.

To evolve, individuals have the capability to use their problems or illnesses to trace their lives back to the lives of their ancestors, much as the adult salmon leaves the sea to swim upriver to revisit its place of birth. This is because where a person was born has a particular meaning, as does where the person's parents were born. By rediscovering the ambience of their origins -- the context, the color, the smell of their conception, individuals can finally discover what debts they owe, pay them off, and choose the path most optimal to meet their individual, specific needs.

Chapters discuss the appearance of the illness principle, biological conflict as the cause of illness, adaptive autonomic processes in response to adversity, halting illness and returning to health, the "purpose" of illness, an explication of cancer, friendly germs, transgenerational programming, unconscious parental projection, and the nature and procedure of a therapeutic path through the process of illness and self-cure.