In specialized languages, alike in general language, one concept can receive more than one designation, a phenomenon called terminological variation. Terminological variants can be motivated by a social or communicative context and they can also reflect a cognitive motivation, the latter often implying a particular focus of information that points to a particular dimension of the concept. In this paper we focus on the cognitive motivations of terminological variation and base our approach on the ways of seeing proposal (Croft and Cruse 2004: 137), arguing that terms are a reflection of our interaction with the world surrounding us, a reflection of our embodied and situated conceptualization (Gibbs 2006; Barsalou 2008). We studied signs and symptoms of a number of medical domains to see how the ways a situated and dynamic perspective in the language user can trigger the activation of perceptual or conceptual-based lexical information that can be analyzed in the semantic relations of the terms. Such relations have indeed a pragmatic function in bringing terminology closer to the lay person or the expert, as revealed in corpus analysis. We describe the ways of seeing brought about by terminological variants in the domain of Medicine, following data obtained in research within the CombiMed Project and registered in the VariMed database. The main relations analyzed in the domain of Health care are: AFFECTS, AGENT, RESULT, NON-VISUAL ATTRIBUTE, VISUAL ATTRIBUTE, COMPOSED OF, TEMPORAL STAGE, INTENSITY, DISCOVERER, LOCATION, GEOGRAPHICAL ORIGIN. We conclude that the way we interact with the environment and its objects, properties, events and processes is dynamic and configures the way we refer to concepts. References Barsalou, L. W. 2008. “Situating concepts.” In P. Robbins & M. Aydede (eds.). Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 236–263. Croft, William and Cruse, Alan. 2004. Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, R.W. 2006. Metaphor interpretation as embodied simulation. Mind & Language, 21-3, 434–458.