WITH little cash in his pocket and an extra large suitcase filled with newly tailored nurse uniforms, Dr. Rhigel Jay Tan, 22, left the country in 1994 to try his luck in the US.

Rhigel “Jay” Tan knew there had to be a better way. Like many of his colleagues, the UNLV professor and psychiatric and mental health nurse practitioner had long been skeptical of the trial-and-error approach to prescribing medicine for mental health patients.

Finding reliable objective measures for chronic pain is an important step to advancing pain management. Recently, investigators have identified a variety of pain biomarkers, understood as integral to nociceptive functioning, and have used them as therapeutic targets when assessing exercise as an intervention for chronic pain conditions. However, could such biomarkers function as actual objective measures for chronic pain, as well?

If you are a typical American, especially one who was born and raised here as we were, you probably believe—know—as we did that, Americans have a lock on fried chicken. Then we met Salve Vargas Edelman, who took us to her favorite Manila chicken joint. But this place, Max’s Restaurant, wasn’t in Manila. It was in Las Vegas, in a strip mall, a few miles past Caesars Palace, and it was there that we were fortuitously, deliciously, humbled.