For some reason, in my thirties, I began to feel anxious about flying. It happened--pardon the pun--out of the blue. I'd had no bad experiences and I am not particularly phobic. I know I'm in good company: my patients. One of the most common prescription requests I get is for anti-anxiety medicine for people who are afraid to fly. Fear of flying is very common, affecting 20%-30% of people. What, exactly, are we afraid of? Crashing, of course, and terrorism and then there's claustrophobia (fear of closed spaces) and acrophobia (fear of heights) and agoraphobia (fear of environments over which we have little control).

Now, there's something else to worry about in the air, something not common but much more common than most of the things we're already worrying about: a medical emergency.

A few years ago, while I was teaching in the hospital, a medical student presented the case of a man with coronary artery disease, diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia. When we entered the man's room I was surprised that the student had omitted a certain fact from his presentation: the man weighed well over 400 pounds.

No one argues that diabetes and blocked coronary arteries are diseases. And nobody argues that obesity, at least in part, causes these diseases--or that losing weight helps improve or even reverse them. But the question of whether obesity itself is a disease has been controversial.

The American Medical Association, the nation's leading organization of physicians, has just announced its stand on the question: obesity is a disease.

A fascinating op-ed piece by Brigham and Women's physician and Harvard Medical School professor Jerry Avorn appeared on June 11th in The New York Times. It's called "Healing the Overwhelmed Physician." What the 'overwhelmed physician" about whom Dr. Avorn writes is overwhelmed by may surprise you.

It surprised me.

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, accounts of interactions like the one depicted in this brief video clip, in which a U.S. Marine who lost both legs in combat counsels a new amputee, reminded me of the power patients have to help heal other patients. Patient-to-patient healing occurs in many ways, formal and informal, from group medical visits to impromptu meetings.

In my most recent Boston Globe "In Practice" column, I wrote about patient-to-patient healing, including the story of a conversation between two of my own patients which was helpful in an unexpected way.

Have you experienced patient-to-patient healing?

I've invented a new medical term.

The Michael Douglas Factor: When a celebrity, even one with good intentions, uses his or her own condition to disseminate incomplete, misleading, or incorrect medical information.

True story: my late mom once lectured a guy who was nearly about to kill her. She warned him that his anger might lead to heart trouble.

She was driving on a country road and this guy started following her. When they reached her driveway, he jumped out of his car, pressed his red face against her window, and then backed away, saying: "Oh, so you're not the one who cut me off!" Mom rolled down her window and yelled after him: "Calm down, mister! Remember, your priority is your arteries!"

According to a study released this week by Harvard Medical School, Mom was right.

When Angelina Jolie announced that she'd undergone a bilateral mastectomy to prevent the breast cancer for which a genetic mutation puts her at high risk, I found myself, as a doctor and as a woman, full of admiration and gratitude for her...and also, in retrospect, for Betty Ford.

I confess I'm besotted with "Call the Midwife," the British series on PBS, now in its second season. It's based on the memoirs of a woman named Jenny Lee, who served as a young nurse-midwife in the slums of London in the late 1950s. What's so great about it? The usual stuff that makes a British series so appealing--the writing, the period costumes...those accents! But what draws me to the show is the portrayal of Jenny and the other nurses, pedaling around London on their bicycles to deliver babies and tend to the sick and poor. The nurses are knowledgeable and technically expert in matters of health, but equally interested in every other aspect of their patients' lives. Mother not bonding with baby? Elderly shut-in seeming lonely? Back on their bikes go the nurses. The show is like a fantasy of what nursing is like.

Except it's no fantasy. Park the bikes, lose the accents and the funny hats, and the nurses with whom I work are not so very different from Jenny Lee and her comrades.

Here's a joke I love: A man goes to an old-school psychiatrist who, at the first session, administers some Rorschach tests.

"Just tell me the first thing that comes to mind," the doctor instructs the patient as he shows him the ink blots.

Not long ago I noted a certain older patient's name on my schedule. I really dreaded seeing her. It's not that I dislike her--in fact she's one of my favorite patients. It was just that I hated the prospect of seeing her looking as poorly as I knew she would. She'd been through so much: an accident resulting in devastating injuries followed by painful surgeries, and, worst, in the middle of

all that, the death of one of her adult children. Surely she'd be in awful shape, psychologically, if not physically. I mean, how much can one person take?

A lot, apparently.

I’m sitting here stranded at home, along with thousands of my neighbors, thinking about Boston. About how long it took me to like it. Even to understand it.

Shortly after we moved here 23 years ago with our baby daughter, my husband and I went to a party. I met a man who had moved here 20 years earlier and asked him how long it took before he felt at home. “Hasn’t happened yet,” he answered.

But it did happen, eventually, for me.

A psychiatric colleague once told me that the incidence of anxiety disorders went down drastically during the Blitz, when London was under constant siege by German bombs in 1940-1941. I don't know whether this is true, or even how you could measure such a thing under those conditions--but it makes sense to me. The patients I saw at Massachusetts General Hospital the day after the terrorist attacks just two miles away, near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, were very calm. And more interested in talking about others than themselves.

There's this weird feeling I get when I hear bad news, or even not that bad news, or even the possibility of bad news: a tingling that spreads across my forehead, down my face, into my jaw, and then to my chest, where it settles like a...no, not a lump...a void. I get the feeling every time I go for my annual mammogram or any other medical test, I wonder how I would react to a bad outcome. Would I be brave and noble, as so many of my patients are? Or would I be like Woody Allen in this classic scene from Hannah and Her Sisters--yes, the actress is Julie Kavner, the voice of Marge Simpson--one of the "weaker ones," panicked, swallowed up in the void of my own fear?

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is going to be getting a lot of mail.

Certain questions come up frequently--daily!-- in my medical practice. Often these concern issues that have been reported heavily in the media and/or about which there is controversy. Here is the first in what will be an occasional series on this blog--"FAQ"--addressing some of the questions my patients ask me frequently. Please contact me at inpracticemd@gmail.com if there are medical topics which you think should be covered here in "FAQ."

One of the things about which I'm asked most commonly is calcium. Some of the confusion comes from the fact that our knowledge about calcium and health is evolving. A recent study showing that men who take calcium supplements have an increased risk of heart attacks is just the latest in an avalanche of sometimes conflicting information.

When I entered the exam room I found my patient, a woman in her 80s who'd come in for a routine visit, holding a photograph. "I need to show you something," she said. Some patients bring me photos at every visit--usually their kids' or grandkids' annual school pictures, or smartphone shots of a wedding or christening--but she never had before. I wondered what it might be.

She laid the photo on the corner of my desk. In it, she appeared, a few years younger than she is now, with a handsome, middle aged man who resembled her. He might have been her son, except she'd never mentioned him before.

"This is my son," she said.

Mention the term "surgeon general" to anyone over 35 or so and they won't think of the doctor who currently holds that position (that's Regina Benjamin, who some have felt has not spoken or acted forcefully enough about threats to our nation's health). Nor will they think of the surgeon general who released the famous 1964 report linking smoking with lung cancer and whose warning appears on every pack of cigarettes. (That was Luther L. Terry). Rather, they'll think of C. Everett Koop, who held the office from 1981 to 1989 and who died this week at 96.

In an excellent recent cover article in the Boston Globe Magazine, Darshak Sanghavi explored a fascinating phenomenon: patients are less likely to sue doctors who admit they've made a mistake, particularly if they apologize for their errors. Innovative programs, such as one at the University of Michigan, encourage physicians to reveal their mistakes to patients, express remorse, and offer compensation to patients who may have been harmed by those mistakes---even if those patients haven't sued them.

But less dramatic apologies are actually a frequent and important part of everyday medical practice. I say "I'm sorry" all day long--and so do my colleagues.

I know I blogged about it last week, and I don't intend for this to become the Downton Abbey forum (fun as that would be), but the hit Masterpiece series has again raised an issue that's as relevant to medical practice today as it was in 1920 when the drama is set. Since the last episode, people have been asking me whether I thought Dr. Clarkson told a lie, which got me thinking about whether it's ever okay for a doctor to lie to patient.

SPOILER ALERT! If you have not yet seen the fourth episode of the third season of Downton Abbey and wish to be surprised by it, read no further. And if you aren't watching PBS's addictive costume drama currently set in 1920--and, seriously, why aren't you?--read on anyway.

This is about medicine, then vs. now.

I saw 17 patients in my primary care practice yesterday. Six of them were coughing.

Welcome to Boston in January.

One of the most basic parts of my job is sorting out who's a little sick from who's very sick, or in danger of getting very sick. How do I do that when so many people have the same symptom? And, as a patient, how do you know when your own cough is worth a trip to the doctor (especially when it's cold, you feel rotten, and the waiting room is likely to be full of...coughing people)?

It's enough to make you tear out your hair--or run to the refrigerator. Just when you've made your New Year's resolution to lose weight, pulled the laundry off your treadmill, and replaced the egg nog with Crystal Light, an article comes out showing that being overweight may actually make you live longer.

My husband and I don't exchange holiday gifts. We don't not exchange them--we're not protesting the commercialization of the season or anything--it's just how we roll. There is one exception though: every year he buys me the annual edition of Best American Essays. Even though I could buy it myself, even though I routinely do buy books for myself, traditionally, he buys this one for me.

I love Best American. It always contains great writing from expected places like The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic. But it also features essays from lesser known journals with wonderful names like Normal School, The Hedgehog Review and Lapham's Quarterly.

This year's volume, edited by New York Times columnist David Brooks, includes no fewer than eight essays on medical themes. 8 out of 24! One-third!

No, not that kind of health/medicine books. If you were interested in learning more about how to go gluten-free, have clearer sinuses, or be less co-dependent, I have recommendations for reading--but not here.

Rather, I'd like to share with you my five favorite works of literature relating to health and medicine published in 2012. This genre is ever-growing, with new memoirs, literary nonfiction, and even novels and poetry collections added each year.

Enjoy--and do comment below or write to me with your own favorites:

Suppose 20 children and 6 adults died at a school in a very short time period. And suppose there were clusters of similar deaths, many of young, healthy people, around the country: at a movie theater, a shopping mall, a high school, a house of worship. Wouldn't you expect the Centers for Disease Control to get involved in trying to figure out why these people died and how to prevent similar deaths? Wouldn't you want your own doctor to do all he or she could do to prevent similar "outbreaks" from occurring in your community? Even if the cause of the deaths turned out to be complex, multi-factorial, and overlapped non-medical arenas, such as the law?

I would not have thought that such suppositions would be controversial, but they are.