Guy Simonnet is professor emeritus of cell biology at the University of Bordeaux-III; he is a member of the French Society for the Study and Treatment of Pain, and of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP).
Professor Bernard Laurent is a neurologist and head of the Anti-Pain Center, which he founded at the CHU [Centre Hospitalier Universitaire?] of Saint-Étienne.
David Le Breton is professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg. A member of the Institut universitaire de France, he is the author of more than forty books.

The failure of our Western societies is all the more obvious in that more than two-thirds of chronic pain patients are not being treated appropriately for it.
How can we explain such an epidemic, and such a failure? What is lacking in our understanding of pain? And what is lacking in the treatment of all those patients?
Coming out of the work of three specialists – a neurobiologist, a pain doctor, and an anthropologist – this book shows that pain doesn’t develop in an amnesic brain, but within a central nervous system imbued with the past, both painful and not painful, close and distant.
This is why, without neglecting the considerable progress of biomedicine and the neurosciences, it is essential to put the patient back in the heart of the painful phenomenon. Which implies focusing on the patient’s individual history and his vulnerability to pain, which relate as much to existential issues as to biological ones.