Medical discourse features a discussion of issues pertaining to language use in medical contexts. It usually focuses on providers and patients’ efforts to unravel patients’ medical challenges, with a view to proffering solutions to them. In the course of their interaction, they deploy certain pragmatic principles of utterances interpretation which enable them to make their discourse a result-oriented one. The conceptual framework adopted for this study is discourse pragmatics. So, this study examined the deployment of the tools of discourse pragmatics during clinical interviews between doctors and patients at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria. The purpose was to understand how the interlocutors were able to achieve the various communicative goals through the use of language i.e. manage conflicts arising from different expectations and imbalance in power and knowledge schemas between doctors and patients, put across messages indirectly or directly, and observe the phases in the consultations. Sections of the data that reflected ample use of pragmatic cues were purposively selected. The analysis was based on the concept of discourse pragmatics. Each of the medical discourse themes performed a number of pragmatic functions: asymmetry, portrayed the imbalance in power and knowledge schemas between doctors and patients; routine was deployed to observe the various phases in consultation; misalignment showed how conflicts arising from divergence in knowledge and power schemas between doctors and patients were resolved; directness revealed how doctors and patients determined the appropriate level of directness required to formulate a particular speech act and; indirectness graphically illustrated how the patients made candidate diagnosis and sought a diagnosis without explicitly asking. An appropriate comprehension of the application of discourse pragmatics to medical discourse themes will enhance the understanding of doctor-patient interactions.