the corner office

The BBC about the Chilean miners

Dr Neumann said one was suffering from a dental infection and the other had vertigo.

She described vertigo as like a dizziness that made it difficult for the patient to maintain balance and walk properly.

I could understand the BBC wanting to say 'She described vertigo as' if the doctor had instead purported that vertigo was a condition where the patient smeared themselves in bat faeces while reciting Edward Lear poems backwards. It would then be both newsworthy and useful for readers to know that the doctor meant something other than what vertigo is normally defined as in the dictionary. In any other situation, I'm not sure why the attribution should be necessary.