When patients undertake behavior change, the physician's role is that of an athletic coach or tour guide, providing direction on the trip but leaving the itinerary up to the patient.

Health coaching performed by members of the health care team can increase the chances that the four principles are upheld during every patient visit.

Primary care physicians should be competent in lifestyle medicine, promoting, practicing, staying current on, discussing with patients, and prescribing therapeutic lifestyle changes.

Exposing the role that individual lifestyle decisions play in determining risk for and experience of disease can raise thorny ethical dilemmas.

Until healthful food is widely affordable and accessible to all people, any discussions of how policy might infringe on the right to choose may be misguided.

The causes of many health behaviors are deeply rooted in our culture, and using a counseling model that assumes individual control and responsibility for these behaviors can cause patients to feel hectored instead of helped.

Because the biomedical model of disease has been the prevailing one in our lifetimes, it may appear to be a new concept. But medical thinkers from Hippocrates to George Engel have been considering the interaction between disease processes and the patient's circumstances for a long time.

An aggregation of evidence over a span of decades has established as a bedrock fact of modern epidemiology that tobacco, poor diet, and lack of physical activity constitute the leading causes of chronic disease, including cardiovascular disease, and premature death.

Qualifying conscience protections for institutions with requirements that they minimize hardship caused to the patient would prevent religious institutions from acting as a choke point on the path to services.

To participate in a lethal injection is to occupy the medical role and use medical training for a purpose that is not part of the goals of medicine and that harms the recipient of treatment.