Medicine and health vocabulary (B2 Vocabulary)

Medical English leans on set collocations, so the exact partner word matters. A clinical diagnosis is a diagnosis a doctor reaches from examining the patient's signs, symptoms, and history rather than from lab or imaging tests. A surgical procedure is an operation, treatment in which a surgeon cuts into the body to repair, remove, or replace something (say this, not "operation procedure"). And adverse effects are the unwanted, harmful reactions a drug can cause, in clinical writing the terms are adverse effects and adverse reactions, while "bad side effects" is understood but too casual for a medical report.

Medical terms travel in fixed pairs

Describing how illnesses behave

When you describe a condition, precise adjectives do the work. An illness that is highly contagious spreads very easily from one person to another ("highly" is the standard written form; "very contagious" is fine in speech). A chronic condition is one that lasts a long time or keeps coming back, while an acute condition comes on suddenly and is severe. Chronic and acute are opposites, not synonyms: chronic is about how long it lasts, acute about how sharply and quickly it strikes.