Health professionals must commit themselves to improving care for dying patients and to use existing knowledge effectively to prevent and relieve pain and other symptoms. The success of this conference clearly demonstrated health professionals' interest and the need for ongoing education in this very important yet young field. This issue of Cancer Control contains some of the proceedings from this palliative care conference. Highlights from the conference have been selected that are thought to be of interest to the readers of this journal. We are now beginning to see major efforts to improve the care of patients with advanced chronic diseases near the end of life.
Unrelieved pain is a common cause of suffering.
Control of pain and other physical symptoms is one of the major goals of palliative care. 3 Many patients experience severe pain because they do not receive adequate therapy. Pauline Lesage, MD, and Russell Portenoy, MD, present specific recommendations for the assessment and management of pain in patients with cancer. They emphasize that successful treatment of cancer pain requires therapies that address the etiology of pain, the patient's medical status, and the goals of care. Utilization of pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic approaches, as well as disease-oriented interventions, are discussed as important parts of overall pain management.