Oschman, a former cell biology researcher, applies his scientific training to the emerging field of energy medicine. While previous investigators (Franz Anton Mesmer, Guillaume Benjamin Armand Duchenne, Edwin D. Babbitt, Harold Saxon Burr) were either ignored or selectively accepted, healers from ancient times have used touch to heal or even cure the human body, and the human body itself has sophisticated strategies to heal itself.

Oschman shows how the body is a living crystal with electricity, magnetism, and light flowing through it, often at higher speeds than the standard neurology model. Quantum physics applies here, as well as piezoelectricity (pressure electricity), explaining how energy flows through water molecules in the collagen that invests every internal structure of the body. Proteins in the body are semiconductors, and our brain waves may even be tuned to standing energy waves (Schumann resonance) that surround the earth itself.

Oschman collects data and illustrations widely, from acupuncture, Qi Gong, massage, yoga, meditation, Zen, and of course, standard medicine. The latter, he argues, whether through scalpels or pharmaceuticals, can be understood as energy medicine. Even better, in his point of view, would be an imaginative synthesis of standard medicine with many (other) forms of energy medicine.