Promoting health by promoting comfort.

While comfort is a concept frequently addressed in the nursing literature, few have adequately addressed this concept as a central patient objective. At present, our literature focuses more on comfort as a nursing action than on comfort as an individualized patient goal. Comfort may be more likely to be the driving force for patients obtaining healthcare services than health itself. This patient need, coupled with nursing interventions to assist them in identifying and implementing constructive ways of promoting their own comfort needs, will help to achieve an optimal state of health.