Through this text, Philippe Barrier delivers a fully innovative analysis of the "illness ordeal".

The author, Philippe Barrier, who can be portrayed as a sufferer in good shape, is a philosopher and PhD in the Sciences of education. Well-known in the medical circles for the trainings he provides to doctors and nursing staffs on therapeutic education, he also teaches medical ethic and takes part to numerous conferences and publications dedicated to healthcare philosophy.

Beneath the researcher and the philosopher, Philippe Barrier is a man affected by a chronic illness and he managed to design a book not much on illness as on health. This can be defined as the work of a person who found his equilibrium, his harmony and his self-fulfillment despite (and in) his illness experience.

Thus, he consigns his discovering of a human potentiality of self-regulation, which allowed him to manage his life with the illness and to convert it into a positive experience. Yet this personal reconstruction can only be possible through a positive medical care relation offering the proper attentiveness to the subject who is above all a human being, with his own sensitivity, imagination, and ability to understand and decide, and cannot be reduced to a mere object of medical cares.