It is often suggested that the incidence of cancer and coronary heart disease could be much reduced or even eliminated if only people would stop smoking cigarettes and eat fewer high-cholesterol foods. The evidence, however, shows that such views are simplistic and unrealistic and that, instead, cancer and CHD are the product of many risk factors acting synergistically. Psychosocial factors (stress, personality) are six times as predictive as smoking, cholesterol level or blood pressure and much more responsive to prophylactic treatment. This book admits that, while smoking is a risk factor for cancer and CHD, its effects have been exaggerated. A more realistic appraisal of a very complex chain of events incorporating many diverse factors is given, and appropriate action to prevent cancer and coronary heart disease is discussed.

What is cancer? Traditionally, medical science has thought of it as an invasive tumor arising spontaneously in an otherwise healthy organism. Consequently, it has naïvely devised increasingly intricate techniques to eradicate the tumor and treat its complications. These techniques have had varying degrees of success. In contrast, Reich defines cancer not as a tumor-the tumor is merely a late manifestation of the disease-but as a systemic disease due to chronic thwarting of natural sexual functioning. The ensuing biopathic shrinking of the organism is revealed initially in emotional despair and resignation, which leads eventually to a disturbance of cellular metabolism, with the tumor as its most visible manifestation. In this radically different scientific investigation of a process that ends, literally, in the putrefaction of the living body due to chronic suffocation of the tissues, Reich has arrived at the conclusion that "cancer is the most significant somatic expression of the biophysiological effect of sexual stasis." If this is so, there is a far greater possibility for the prophylaxis of cancer than for its treatment. Reich's contribution to an understanding of cancer is based on his years of clinical, social, and laboratory study of human emotions and his discovery of the specific energy processes manifested in them. A detailed account of this discovery forms the opening chapters of the book, providing the experimental and theoretical basis for the later chapters in which he presents his findings on the emotional background of the disease, the crucial role played by inadequate sexual functioning that causes a general devitalization and shrinking, the origin of the cancer cell, experimental therapy with laboratory animals and human beings, and, finally, the problems and possibilities of prevention.