Health in hope: finding the soul of primary care.

Discusses the importance of offering hope to clients, no matter what their circumstances. Hope can be hard to find in situations of extreme poverty, and poverty breeds hopelessness. But hope promotes healthy behavior, like increased consumption of fruits and vegetables, regular exercise, safer sex, smoking cessation, and resumption of medications. That is the power of hope working in the heart of a patient to do what no clinician can: make good decisions, forgo bad habits, and see health as a priority and reality in life. Foster hope. Hope is healthy.