Band 6.5 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 6.5 · Cambridge IELTS 17 · 2026-10-06

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

Nowadays, a growing number of people with health problems are trying alternative medicines and treatments instead of visiting their usual doctor.

Do you think this is a positive or a negative development?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Student answer (Band 6.5)

In recent years, growing number of people with health problems has emerged a trend of trying alternative medicines and treatment instead of consulting usual doctors or physicians. While this shift, ensures physical well-being by being proactive, the significance of using proven medication and treatment ensures safety and reliability.

On the one hand, the rise of alternative therapies help individual to prevent illness beforehand. It ensures patient empowerment and physical well-being. Sickness like - cold, fever even nausea, happen because of weather change and other circumstances. Visiting doctor for these regular kind of sickness stains a lot of money unnecessarily knowing the kind of medicines doctor will be prescribing beforehand. Alongside, consuming herbs and other natural ingredients help treating the body from the root boosting an indvidual's immunity power. Herbal medicine, and mindfulness-based therapies tend to emphasize lifestyle adjustments, stress reduction, and overall bodily harmony. Therefore, traditional medical visits are often brief, symptom-focused, and heavily reliant on pharmaceutical interventions, which may carry undesirable side effects.

On the other hand, substituting conventional medical care with unproven alternative treatments carries severe risks, primarily due to delayed diagnosis and a lack of rigorous scientific regulation. Relying on proven medicines or prescribed treatments ensure reliability and safety. When patients opt for non-conventional cures for serious conditions—such as bacterial infections, cardiovascular diseases, or early-stage cancers, they risk postponing crucial diagnostic scans and life-saving medical treatments. A delayed intervention in critical conditions often leads to irreversible health deterioration, making this trend dangerous when pursued as a total replacement for conventional medicine.

In conclusion, while trying alternative medicines for repetitive regular illness ensures financial saving and proactivity, consuming unproven medicines without doctor's advice is harmful to health and growth which can result to serious irreversible issue or even death. Therefore, I think, for serious and severe illness, doctor's advice or following tarditional treatment pathways remain the smartest way.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 7.0

Your response successfully addresses all parts of the prompt by presenting a clear position throughout, acknowledging both sides of the issue before concluding that conventional medicine is superior for serious illnesses. Your ideas are generally extended and supported, such as when you discuss how lifestyle adjustments in alternative therapies help prevent illness, and how delaying conventional care for conditions like cardiovascular diseases poses significant risks. However, there is a slight tendency to over-generalize in certain claims, such as stating that visiting a doctor for regular sickness always stains a lot of money unnecessarily. To reach a higher band, you could ensure that every supporting point is fully fleshed out with more precise examples or nuanced perspectives rather than relying on broad assertions about routine illnesses.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 7.0

Your essay demonstrates a clear logical organization and progression throughout. You make effective use of paragraphing, ensuring each paragraph has a distinct focus, starting with an introduction that outlines your stance, moving through body paragraphs addressing both sides of the debate, and ending with a clear conclusion. You use cohesive devices flexibly, such as 'On the one hand', 'On the other hand', 'Alongside', and 'Therefore', which helps guide the reader smoothly through your arguments. Minor improvements in referencing and the seamless linking of sentences would help elevate your control of cohesion even further, but the overall arrangement is coherent and easy to follow.

Lexical Resource: Band 6.0

You display an adequate range of vocabulary for the task and successfully attempt less common items, such as 'proactive', 'mindfulness-based therapies', 'pharmaceutical interventions', and 'diagnostic scans'. However, there are some inaccuracies in word choice, collocation, and phrasing throughout the text. For instance, phrases like 'stains a lot of money' should be 'costs a lot of money' or 'wastes a lot of money', and 'help treating the body' should be 'help treat the body'. Additionally, minor errors such as spelling 'indvidual' and slight awkwardness in phrasing like 'repetitive regular illness' prevent this criterion from reaching a higher level. Your vocabulary is sufficient to communicate your ideas clearly, but greater precision and fewer collocation slips are needed for a higher band.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.5

Your response features a mix of simple and complex sentence forms, demonstrating attempts at varied structures such as conditional and participial clauses. However, there are persistent grammatical errors throughout the text, including issues with subject-verb agreement and article usage. For example, the opening sentence contains missing articles and a faulty subject structure ('In recent years, growing number of people... has emerged a trend'). Other errors include 'help individual' instead of 'help individuals', 'sickness like - cold, fever even nausea, happen' where pluralization and punctuation require correction, and 'result to' instead of 'result in'. While these errors rarely impede communication, their frequency means that error-free sentences are not dominant enough to secure a higher grade.

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