Pain is often inadequately treated. To evaluate a common method of assessing pain and to identify some barriers to improving pain control, 50 hospitalized patients in pain, their nurses, and their physicians were interviewed about the pain experienced by the patients. The patients' "pain behavior" was assessed and literatures was reviewed to identify the risk for developing iatrogenic drug addiction in patients with no prior history of drug abuse. Doctors and nurses tended to assess pain intensity as less than the patients' assessments. The doctor's and nurse's assessment of the same patient correlated poorly (r = 0.21). Pain behavior correlated weakly (rs = 0.36) with patients' pain scores. Twenty-one patients wanted more pain medicine but often staff would not give more. A common reason was fear of addiction, notwithstanding a literature that iatrogenic addiction hardly ever occurs in usual hospitalized patients. Barriers to better pain control in acutely hospitalized patients include: (1) exaggerated fear of iatrogenic addiction, (2) an attitude among staff that patients exaggerate the intensity of their pain, (3) poor correlation between pain behavior and pain intensity that can mislead staff who rely on pain behavior to assess pain intensity, and (4) a lack of agreement between doctor and nurse in estimating the intensity of a patient's pain. A new way of thinking about patients in pain, assessing pain as either present or absent, is proposed for evaluation. If pain is present, one should attempt to ameliorate it in a manner consistent with the desire of the patient and the acceptability of adverse effects.