Virtuous English AcademyHealth & Wellbeing — B1 English Vocabulary
This B1 vocabulary list gathers 40 intermediate English words about health & wellbeing — illness, medicine and staying well. Every word comes with a simple definition, its British-English pronunciation and a natural example sentence, so you learn each one in real context. When you are ready, open the flashcards to practise and remember them for good.
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Using health & wellbeing words in English
Medical English separates three ideas that most languages cover with one or two verbs: you treat a patient, you cure a disease, and a wound heals by itself. Choosing the wrong one is the most frequent error on this topic. Alongside it are two preposition patterns that appear constantly in real conversation — allergic to and addicted to — and a noun, disease, that is not quite interchangeable with illness.
What to watch out for
Treat, cure and heal do three different jobs
You treat a person or a condition — the ongoing care, which may or may not work: They treated her for pneumonia. You cure a disease or a patient completely: Antibiotics cured the infection. A wound, a bone or a burn heals, usually without an object at all: The cut healed in a week. So doctors treat, medicine cures, and the body heals.
Allergic to, addicted to, suffer from
These prepositions are fixed and worth drilling: allergic to nuts, addicted to social media, suffer from asthma, a symptom of flu, recover from surgery. Note that suffer without from means something else — the economy suffered — and that addiction as a noun keeps the same preposition: an addiction to gambling.
Disease, illness and operation
A disease is a named medical condition with a cause, often serious: heart disease, an infectious disease. An illness is the broader experience of being unwell, and it can be brief. For surgery, British English says have an operation; the surgeon operates on the patient, with on. And a prescription is the paper the doctor writes, which you take to a pharmacy.
Words learners mix up
Three tables: the four words for feeling unwell and what each actually claims, the small things that make you ill and how English counts them, and four health nouns that never take an -s.
Ill, sick, painful, unhealthy — four different claims
| Word | What it actually means | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|
| ill | The standard British adjective for being unwell. It normally comes after the verb rather than in front of a noun. | He has been ill since Tuesday. |
| sick | American English uses it where Britain uses ill. In British English be sick most often means to vomit. | The child was sick in the car. |
| painful | Describes the thing that hurts, never the person. The person is in pain. | The injection was not painful. |
| unhealthy | Describes a habit, a diet or a lifestyle rather than somebody who happens to be unwell today. | It is an unhealthy way to live. |
The British be sick trap is worth memorising: I was sick three times is about vomiting, while I was off sick means absent from work through illness, and sick leave and a sick note both belong to the second sense. In front of a noun British English also prefers a sick child to an ill child, so the two adjectives swap places depending on where they stand in the sentence.
What made you ill, and how English counts it
| Word | What it actually means | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|
| germ | The everyday, non-technical word for anything microscopic that causes illness. Countable and usually plural. | Wash your hands to kill the germs. |
| bacteria | Already plural — the singular is bacterium — so it is bacteria are and never a bacteria. | These bacteria resist most antibiotics. |
| infection | Countable, and it names the event of becoming ill rather than the organism that caused it. | She picked up an infection in hospital. |
| allergy | Countable, and the adjective takes to. What happens to your body is a reaction. | He has an allergy to dairy products. |
Bacteria is the one that costs marks. Spoken English is drifting towards treating it as a singular mass noun, but written English has not moved and examiners follow the written standard, so the verb after it stays plural. Virus, by contrast, is a perfectly ordinary countable noun with the plural viruses, which is why the two behave so differently in a sentence.
Four health nouns that never take an -s
| Word | What it actually means | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|
| nutrition | The whole subject of what food does to the body. Uncountable, so good nutrition and never nutritions. | The course covers nutrition and exercise. |
| hygiene | Cleanliness as a practice. Uncountable, and the spelling catches everybody at least once. | Food hygiene rules here are strict. |
| relaxation | The state of being relaxed, or the activity itself. Uncountable, with the stress on the third syllable. | She uses music for relaxation. |
| wellbeing | A person’s general state of health and contentment. Uncountable, and increasingly written as one word in Britain. | The policy is about staff wellbeing. |
None of the four can follow a or take a plural, and all four are far more common in writing than in speech — a British doctor is likelier to say eat properly than improve your nutrition. Note also that wellbeing, well-being and well being all appear in print; the single word is now the commonest British form and the hyphen is the safe fallback.
Collocations that sound natural
Six words that appear inside fixed phrases far more often than they appear alone. Describing an illness convincingly is mostly a matter of getting the phrase, not the word, right.
symptom
symptoms of flushow symptomsmild symptomsflu-like symptoms
The preposition is of, and the verb beside it is show or have rather than feel. The adjectives are doing real work — mild, severe, persistent — and flu-like keeps its hyphen.
prescription
write a prescriptionon prescriptiona repeat prescriptionprescription only
In Britain a medicine that needs a doctor is available on prescription, and a repeat prescription is one your surgery renews without a new appointment. The verb is prescribe, which takes the medicine as its object and the patient after for.
recovery
make a full recoverya slow recoveryon the road to recoveryrecovery time
The verb is make, not do or have. The adjective in front carries the meaning — full, speedy, partial — and on the road to recovery is a set idiom for the point at which the worst is over.
vaccine
develop a vaccinea vaccine against measlesthe flu vaccineroll out a vaccine
The disease takes against or for. The verb vaccinate is usually passive about yourself — I was vaccinated in March — and immunise is the more formal word health services use in their own documents.
therapy
have therapybe in therapya course of therapyspeech therapy
British English says have therapy or be in therapy and never do therapy, which describes the therapist instead of the patient. Britain also says physiotherapy where American English says physical therapy.
pill
take a pillsleeping pillsa bitter pill to swallowpop a pill
You take medicine in every form and never eat or drink it. A bitter pill to swallow is an idiom for unwelcome news, and the pill with the definite article means contraception on both sides of the Atlantic.
Where each word belongs
Seven words carrying a country, a level of formality or a warning about tone. Health is the topic where the wrong register is likeliest to sound careless rather than merely foreign.
- mentalCareful in British speechIn mental health and mental illness the word is neutral and standard. On its own about a person — he is mental — it is old British slang for insane and gives offence. Keep the full phrase and it is safe everywhere, including in exam writing.
- surgeonBritish · surgery has two meaningsA surgeon operates. The trap is surgery, which in British English is both the operation and the building where a family doctor sees patients, as in an appointment at the surgery. In American English that place is an office.
- emergencyCountable · and the British initialsCountable, so an emergency and in an emergency. The hospital department is A&E in Britain, short for accident and emergency, and the ER of American television. The number to dial in Britain is 999 and in Europe 112.
- wellnessAmerican · marketingNewer than wellbeing and attached mostly to products and workplace programmes: a wellness app, corporate wellness. British writing still prefers wellbeing for the same idea, and in exam writing that is the safer choice because wellness reads as advertising.
- fractureMedical · the everyday word is breakA doctor writes a fracture of the wrist; the patient says I broke my wrist. Both are correct, and fracture works as a verb too. British hospitals also use a hairline fracture for a very small one, a phrase with no everyday equivalent.
- antibioticNearly always pluralThe fixed phrase is a course of antibiotics, and you finish a course rather than stopping it. The word is worth knowing precisely because it acts on bacteria and not on viruses, which is why a British doctor will decline to prescribe any for a cold.
- pulseFixed collocations onlyYou take or check somebody’s pulse, and a pulse is racing, weak or steady. There is an unrelated food sense as well — pulses are beans and lentils — so a recipe and a first-aid leaflet can use the same word innocently.
Sentences to try
Four frames covering the three verbs and the fixed prepositions. Adapt them to a real health story.
- The doctors treated him for a serious infection.
- She is allergic to penicillin, so they changed the prescription.
- The wound healed completely within a month.
- A high temperature is the first symptom of the disease.
Questions about health & wellbeing vocabulary
What is the difference between treat, cure and heal?
Treat is the process of giving medical care, and it says nothing about the outcome: They treated her for three weeks. Cure means to remove the disease entirely, so it describes success: The drug cured him. Heal is what damaged tissue does on its own, and it is usually intransitive: The wound is healing well. A useful summary is that a doctor treats a patient, a medicine cures a disease, and skin heals. Heal can be transitive in figurative use: time heals old wounds.
Is it "allergic to" or "allergic of"?
Allergic to: I am allergic to dairy products. The noun keeps the same preposition — an allergy to shellfish. The neighbouring health patterns are equally fixed and best learned as a group: suffer from a condition, recover from an illness, die of or die from a disease, a symptom of something, addicted to a substance, and operate on a patient. None of them can be worked out from logic, so drilling them as whole phrases is the efficient route.
What is the difference between a disease and an illness?
A disease is a specific medical condition with an identifiable cause and usually a name: an infectious disease, heart disease. An illness is the broader state of being unwell, which can be short or vague: He was off work with a short illness. You would not call a common cold a disease in ordinary speech, though it technically is one. Sickness is a third word again, and in British English it often points at nausea or at time absent from work.