The article explores how doctors and patients discursively track responsibility for patients’ poor health after treatment recommendations have been delivered in South-western Nigerian hospitals. It argues that whether poor health is patient or doctor-induced, physician power is dominant in the consultative sessions. In patient induced contexts, poor health is co-constructed as a clear patient responsibility; in doctor-induced contexts, it is co-constructed as a physician error, but responsibility for it is sequentially refused by the doctor, who negotiates a fresh therapy plan to neutralise physician blame. It concludes that while doctors’ simplified language proves useful in negotiating agency in poor health discourses and, consequently, instituting a more effective medical procedure on patients, it reveals doctors’ occasional communication of inadequate and misleading information, use of suppressive interactive power and/or non-acceptance of clinical errors