Musculoskeletal pain is the world’s leading cause of disability. In France, 27% of chronic pain patients are on opioid treatment, and fewer than a third see meaningful improvement from it. Meanwhile, medical deserts are growing across rural France and much of Europe, with patients waiting months to see a specialist.
Yuzit is a MedTech company delivering evidence-based pain treatment through a smartphone app, using guided motor imagery and mindfulness techniques developed over a decade of treating elite athletes. The method requires no medication, no physical strain, and costs less than €10 a month.
Patrick Masse leads strategy and business development at Yuzit, which is based in Biarritz. The company was founded by a sports medicine physician, a physiotherapist who has worked with French national rugby and swimming teams, and an orthopaedic surgeon. We spoke about building clinical evidence before scaling, and why access has to be a design principle rather than an afterthought.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your role?
I’m Patrick Masse, and I lead strategy and business development at Yuzit, a MedTech company based in Biarritz, France. I joined the founding team in 2024, bringing a background in international negotiation and entrepreneurship, to help turn what started as a clinical method — developed by our co-founders over a decade of treating elite athletes — into a company that could reach far beyond professional sport.
My role covers the commercial side of the business: partnerships with health insurers and mutual insurance funds, our international expansion strategy, investor and grant relations, and increasingly our path toward FDA clearance in the US. I work alongside four co-founders with medical and technical backgrounds — a sports medicine physician, a physiotherapist, an orthopaedic surgeon, and an engineer — so my job is largely about translating what they’ve built clinically into something that reaches patients at scale.
How did your company come about and what was the motivation behind it?
Yuzit was born out of a decade of frontline clinical practice, not a lab or a business plan. Our co-founders — Guillaume Zunzarren, a sports medicine physician, and Bertrand Garet, a physiotherapist who has worked with the French national rugby and swimming teams — spent years treating elite athletes with a method combining guided motor imagery and mindfulness to recover from injury and manage pain without medication or physical strain on the body. Jérôme Murgier, an orthopaedic surgeon, brought the surgical and academic rigour that let them formalise and validate what they were seeing clinically.
The motivation to build a company came from a simple, uncomfortable observation: this method worked remarkably well, but it only existed inside elite sport, accessible to a handful of professional athletes with dedicated medical teams. Meanwhile, millions of ordinary people were living with the same kinds of pain — waiting months to see a specialist, or being handed a prescription for opioids that, for most, wouldn’t meaningfully help. Our founders felt that gap was an injustice they were in a unique position to close. Yuzit was founded in 2022 to take a decade of elite sports medicine and put it in the pocket of anyone who needs it.
Can you describe your company’s mission and values?
Our mission is to make effective, evidence-based pain care accessible to anyone, regardless of where they live or how much they can spend on healthcare. Concretely, that means treating musculoskeletal pain — the world’s leading cause of disability — without medication, without physical strain, and for less than €10 a month, from a device most people already carry in their pocket.
Three values guide how we build the company day to day. The first is rigour over hype: we operate in a digital health market full of unproven “wellness” apps, and we’ve deliberately taken the slower road — three peer-reviewed publications, clinical results on 172 patients, and now two further studies backed by Ramsay Santé — because we believe patients and clinicians deserve real evidence, not marketing claims. The second is access as a design principle, not an afterthought: every decision, from our pricing to building a smartphone-only product, is made with medical deserts and financial barriers in mind, not as a nice-to-have but as the actual point of the company. The third is clinical integrity over pure growth: our founding team is still, at its core, made up of practising clinicians, and that keeps commercial decisions accountable to what’s genuinely good for patients, not just what scales fastest.
What are some of the most pressing social issues that your company is working to address through its technology?
Two social issues sit at the heart of what we’re trying to fix.
The first is unequal access to healthcare based on geography. Medical deserts are a growing reality across rural France and much of Europe — regions where the density of specialists is so low that patients can wait months for an appointment. If you’re in pain today, in one of those areas, your options are limited: wait, drive hours to a city, or turn to medication as a stopgap. Because Yuzit works from a smartphone with no clinician required to get started, it removes the geography from the equation entirely. Someone in a rural area gets the exact same access as someone in central Paris.
The second is the overreliance on opioids and medication for chronic pain, and the human cost that comes with it. In France, 27% of chronic pain patients are on opioid treatment, and fewer than a third see meaningful improvement from it — meaning a large number of people are carrying the real risks of long-term opioid use (dependency, side effects) for limited benefit. We’re not anti-medication; for many patients, drugs remain necessary. But we think patients deserve a genuinely effective, non-pharmacological option to try first, or alongside treatment, rather than medication being the only tool offered by default. That’s the gap our clinical evidence is specifically built to fill.
How does your company measure the impact of its work in creating positive change?
We measure impact primarily through clinical outcome data, not vanity metrics like downloads or engagement time. For every patient, we track pain levels (VAS) and functional outcomes (SANE score) before, during, and after their program, which lets us report real numbers rather than anecdotes: 73% of patients report improvement, with an average pain reduction of 2 points and a functional gain of nearly 14 points. That data feeds directly into peer-reviewed publications — three so far, with a fourth in preparation based on our first 172 patients — so our impact claims are externally verified, not self-reported marketing.
We’re also expanding that measurement rigour through formal clinical research: two new studies, one observational and one randomised, are now underway in partnership with Ramsay Santé, France’s leading private hospital group, giving us an even more robust and independent evidence base going forward.
Beyond individual outcomes, we look at access metrics — how many of our users are located in medical deserts or areas with limited specialist availability — as a proxy for whether we’re actually reaching the underserved populations our mission targets, rather than simply adding convenience for people who already have good healthcare access.
In your opinion, what impact will technology have in creating a better future?
I think the real promise of technology in healthcare isn’t about replacing clinicians or adding more devices — it’s about decoupling good care from geography and income, which for most of human history have determined who gets treated well and who doesn’t. A smartphone-delivered treatment can reach someone in a rural medical desert exactly as effectively as someone next to a major hospital, and that’s a genuinely new capability, not an incremental improvement.
But I’d add a caution to that optimism, because it’s one I think about constantly in our own sector: technology only creates that better future if it earns trust through evidence, not through marketing. Digital health is full of apps making big claims with no data behind them, and if that pattern continues, people will rightly become sceptical of all digital health tools, including the ones that genuinely work. The future I want to see isn’t just “more tech in healthcare” — it’s tech that’s held to the same evidentiary standard as any other medical treatment, so that when someone in pain, wherever they are, finally finds something that works, they can actually trust it.
What advice do you have for other companies looking to use technology for good and create a positive impact in the world?
My advice would be: prove it before you scale it. It’s tempting, especially with the pressure to grow fast, to lead with a compelling story and figure out the evidence later. We made the opposite choice deliberately — we spent two years building clinical proof (publications, patient outcomes, regulatory certification) before investing seriously in growth, and it slowed us down in the short term. But it means every claim we make today, we can actually back up, and that’s what’s now opening doors — hospital group partnerships, insurer conversations, a credible regulatory path to the US — that stay closed to companies that tried to shortcut it.
The second thing I’d say is: don’t assume good intentions are enough — build in the measurement from day one. “Impact” isn’t something you can bolt on with a nice mission statement after the fact; you need real metrics from the start (in our case, patient outcome data) that let you honestly assess whether you’re actually helping people, not just assuming you are because your motives are good. It’s uncomfortable sometimes, because early data isn’t always as strong as you’d hoped — but that discomfort is exactly what pushes you to build something that genuinely works, rather than something that just sounds good.
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Yuzit has published three peer-reviewed studies with a fourth in preparation, and has two further studies underway in partnership with Ramsay Santé.
You can find out more at yuzit.fr.
