At the Doctor — symptoms → prescription

A medical conversation as an if/else tree

A visit to the doctor in Chinese is a highly structured branching conversation. You walk in, hand over your registration slip, and the doctor fires the opening question: 哪里不舒服? From there every exchange follows a predictable tree — describe symptoms, answer follow-up questions, submit to examination, receive a diagnosis, walk out with a prescription. Each branch has its own stock vocabulary.

This article pairs with the medicine and health radical tour. Learn the radicals there, learn the branches here, and you have enough to get through a routine clinic visit without switching to English.

// The clinic visit, as a control-flow tree.
function clinicVisit(patient) {
    const symptoms = describeSymptoms(patient);
    if (symptoms.severity === "emergency") return goToER();

    const exam = doctor.examine(patient);
    const diagnosis = doctor.diagnose(symptoms, exam);
    const rx = getPrescription(diagnosis);

    return pharmacy.fill(rx);
}

1. describeSymptoms() — the intake

Intake has three slots: where it hurts, how long it has been going on, and how bad it is. The doctor asks these in order; your answers build the first branch of the tree.

Where it hurts

Pattern: body-part + 疼 (téng) or body-part + 痛 (tòng). Both mean "hurts." 疼 is the everyday spoken form; 痛 is slightly more formal and shows up in written contexts.

How long — the 从...开始 frame

To say "since when," use the sandwich 从 + time + 开始 ("from TIME, start"). The time slot can be a clock time, a day, a date, or a vague duration.

Severity — the intensity adverbs

2. Common symptoms

The core symptom vocabulary. Memorize these and you can describe ninety percent of common ailments.

3. doctor.examine() — the examination

The doctor's side of the conversation is mostly imperatives — short command sentences asking you to do something physical. These are worth memorizing because they come at you fast and you only have a second to comply.

4. doctor.diagnose() — the verdict

The diagnosis arrives as a short declarative sentence. Structure: 你 是 CONDITION or 你 得了 CONDITION ("you've contracted X"). The common conditions are few.

5. getPrescription() — the instructions

The prescription is a densely-packed imperative: how many pills, how many times per day, for how many days, before or after food. The pattern is always the same slot order.

The lifestyle imperatives that always accompany the pills:

6. Pharmacy vocabulary

After the prescription you walk to the 药店 (yàodiàn, pharmacy) — either the hospital's in-house pharmacy window or an external chain. Pharmacists expect the following exchange.

7. Sample dialogs

8. Edge cases

挂号 — register before you see the doctor

In a Chinese hospital you don't just walk into a doctor's office. You first go to the 挂号处 (guàhào chù, registration window), pay a small fee, and specify which department — 内科 (nèikē, internal medicine), 外科 (wàikē, surgery), 儿科 (érkē, pediatrics), and so on. The verb is 挂号 (guàhào), literally "hang-a-number."

Useful sentence: 我 要 挂 内科 (wǒ yào guà nèikē) — "I want to register for internal medicine." For specialist visits the price tier rises: normal doctor (普通, pǔtōng), expert (专家, zhuānjiā), chief physician (主任, zhǔrèn).

医保 — health insurance

医保 (yī bǎo) is short for 医疗保险 — public health insurance. The key sentence at the counter: 我 有 医保 (wǒ yǒu yībǎo) — "I have insurance." Foreigners on short stays usually don't, so the full sticker price applies. Private international clinics are 国际医院 (guójì yīyuàn) or 私立医院 (sīlì yīyuàn).

传染 — contagion flags

传染 (chuánrǎn) is "contagious." If a doctor tells you 这 个 病 会 传染 (zhè ge bìng huì chuánrǎn) — "this illness is contagious" — expect follow-on instructions like 戴 口罩 (dài kǒuzhào, wear a mask) and 在家 隔离 (zài jiā gélí, isolate at home). A related word: 传染病 (chuánrǎnbìng) = infectious disease.

Urgency signals — when to skip the clinic

Certain phrases are the Chinese equivalent of red-flag triggers. If the doctor or anyone else says these, follow immediately — do not negotiate:

疼 vs 痛 vs 不舒服 — the severity spectrum

不舒服 (bù shūfu) is the softest — "not comfortable," a vague malaise. 疼 and 痛 are both sharp pain, but 疼 is colloquial and 痛 leans literary. Spoken medical Chinese overwhelmingly uses 疼. When you want to intensify, stack: 疼 得 受不了 ("hurts to the point of can't-take-it") is the highest register short of the ER.

9. Next steps

• Radical tour: Medicine & Health — 疒, 月 (flesh), 氵 in medical compounds
• Next phrasebook: Body Parts — the full anatomy vocabulary
• Browse health vocabulary — filtered by tag
• Module 6: Control Flow — if/then, although/but, the grammar behind branching conversations

The doctor visit is the best real-world example of Mandarin control flow in action: every response narrows the branch, every branch has its own stock phrases. Once this tree is on autopilot, the rest of medical Chinese — specialist visits, hospital admissions, insurance paperwork — is just more branches grafted onto the same trunk.