Patients’ personal or cultural views toward illness, the business of health care under which we all operate, and our own personal opinions about the ideal of health and wellness can all compromise pain treatment. It is our responsibility to see that it does not.

Addicts quickly learn the diagnoses that cannot be definitively confirmed or ruled out by examinations or test results but that elicit prescriptions for opioid pain management.

Inadequate education of primary care clinicians leads to inadequately treated pain, which has myriad dire consequences. To address this problem, education about pain management should be made a mandatory part of medical school curricula.

The biomedical definition of pain is inadequate to encompass the experiences of patients living with chronic pain.

Serving fast food and other unhealthful offerings in hospital cafeterias sends the message that the institution's bottom line is more important than the health of patients, visitors, employees, and others.

Cancer chemoprevention is rooted in the concept that ingesting certain phytochemicals from specific plants can boost the intrinsic defensive mechanisms of cells that protect against oxidative damage, inflammation, and DNA-damaging chemicals.

Policies intended to discourage eating behaviors that lead to obesity can have unintended consequences or backfire entirely.

Both bans on unhealthful foods and warning label requirements face strong legal opposition from industry and ignite furious public debate about the role and limits of government intervention in American lifestyles.

Opponents to the implementation of mandatory graphic warning labels on cigarette packages cite infringement of free commercial speech, claim that the health harms are already known, and say that including the warnings is expensive. It is imperative that these arguments be weighed against the nearly 400,000 smoking-attributable deaths in the U.S. annually.

Doctors and hospitals must stop being bystanders to food-related illness and begin to become role models and educators in the transition to healthful eating habits, just as they did in tobacco cessation.