Although phatic communication has not gotten much attention in research for the institutional discourse, in fact, it is one of the clearest manifestations of interlocutor’s disposition to cooperate to each other, to achieve a common communicative goal, and to maintain social cohesion. The aim of this study is to examine the linguistic realization of phatic communication in medical context. In the first half of this article, we review the concept of phatic communion from the point of view of Malinowski’s original idea (1984) to highlight the need to distinguish the term, ‘phatic communion’ from ‘phatic communication’. And Holmes’s criteria (2000) have been applied to distinguish social speech from the instrumental in medical context. The analysis on the corpus suggests us to specify such forms in two subcategories depending on the degree of relevance to the context. As a result, we can underline that phatic communication manifests itself in various forms and functions, as well as to various degrees. In addition, phatic markers have been found to be an important resource for performing the technical task because of its positive value in interaction.