Health & Sickness

This lesson focuses on essential vocabulary used when talking about health, sickness, and medical appointments. You'll learn common nouns, verbs, and collocations useful in professional and everyday contexts.

• Learn words for symptoms, places, and medical actions (e.g., fever, clinic, prescribe).
• Practice collocations used in business and healthcare settings (e.g., make an appointment, write a prescription).
• Recognize formal vs. informal expressions and choose the right register for work situations.

Key points to use health vocabulary accurately:

• Use specific nouns for symptoms (e.g., 'fever', 'nausea') and verbs for actions (e.g., 'diagnose', 'recover').
• Mind collocations: 'make an appointment' / 'schedule an appointment' and 'write a prescription' are common.
• Choose register: use formal terms in reports and emails (e.g., 'consult', 'refer'), informal with colleagues (e.g., 'feel sick').

In professional settings prefer precise and formal vocabulary.

Watch out for these universal errors when using health vocabulary:

• Confusing 'symptom' (what a patient feels) with 'diagnosis' (the doctor's conclusion).
• Incorrect article use: some medical nouns can be countable or uncountable (e.g., 'a fever' vs 'feverish symptoms').
• Wrong collocations: say 'make/schedule an appointment', not 'do an appointment'.
• Mixing registers: avoid slang (e.g., 'I'm dying') in formal reports or emails.
• Incorrect verb choice: use 'prescribe' (doctor) and 'take' (patient) correctly.

Focus on word combinations and the context (formal vs. informal) to avoid errors.