Pharmacology, dear lawd.

sjukrabilalfur

sjukrabilalfur

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I'm working my way through Paramedic Pharmacology right now.

Needless to say, the sheer amount of material is a tough pill to swallow. Pun totally intended.

What have been some successful strategies for you in absorbing all of the material, keeping it straight, and learning when to use what, and in what amounts? Also - and this might be less important in the real world - what were your strategies of studying to what you might be tested on?

Any insight would be awesome.
 
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Having just gone through this, I was unable to find any sort of easy way. I asked our pharm teacher (who has his doctorate in education) and he straight up told us "there is no easy way". He suggested flash cards if that was our normal way of learning. For myself it was just a matter of study groups and going over the material many many times.
 
My advice is simple: group the medications by class and learn them that way. Each class has a drug that's representative of the class as a whole, so after you've learned that drug, you know what the class does and for specific drugs, all you have to do is associate the drug with the class and learn the specifics about how that drug is slightly different from the class it's in.

Option 2 is to simply make drug cards for each of your drugs and learn them all individually... but learning the class should be easier as that'll likely help you with home medications too.

It's not exactly easy, but why make it harder on yourself than it has to be?
 
I tried all the usual techniques - cards, study groups, studying by drug class, you name it - and learned enough about them to pass the tests. But I didn't truly learn the drugs until I had to actually start using them. It seemed that connecting the drug to the symptom/condition it was treating made the difference in my ability to master the material. So I suppose what I'm saying is to just do the best you can, understand that all but a unique few of us went through the same struggles, and trust that you will ultimately master the information.
 
Here's the only way to do it:
  • First learn the principles of pharmacokinetics & pharmacodynamics from any good pharm text or website. It's mostly pretty easy stuff to understand and remember and once you've grasped that stuff, you'll know 75% of all the pharm that you'll ever need to know. This step is completely skipped by most paramedic programs and it's really unfortunate because not only is it absolutely foundational to really understanding how drugs work, but it makes learning the individual drugs much easier.
  • Second, learn the drug classes and how the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic principles apply to each class. How they are distributed, what receptors they activate, how they are eliminated. Now you know 95% of clinical pharmacology.
  • Lastly, learn the relevant drugs in each class and what makes them differ from each other in their their pharmacology, indications, doses, etc. For instance, know that fentanyl has a much faster onset and shorter duration than morphine because it is much more lipid soluble, and that morphine activates histamine receptors and mu2 receptors in the gut, which fentanyl does not.
 
I found easy ways to learn everything EXCEPT pharmacology in paramedic school. All of the suggestions so far are fine, however, it is just the sheer amount of material that is awful.

Here's what I did: I made a huge chart that was about 10 pages long, that was blank. I made tons of copies. Everyday, I would fill as much of the chart out as I could from memory, then I would look up the rest and fill them in. I made my own flashcards, because the ones I bought weren't as detailed. When I got halfway through, some of the drugs were very easy to remember, and some were hard. The hard ones, I recorded myself reading all the details about them. Then, the two hours a day I spent driving, everyday, I listened to those details. Then, the amount I didn't know got smaller, so I re-recorded and re-listened. I think we had two weeks to learn it all, and I dedicated approximately 50 hours per week for about 100 hours on the topic and I still struggled, but I passed. I studied them again for the final and registry. Today, I still study them and still struggle to remember a few (ones we have no protocols for; ones we never use).

I plan on taking a true, semester-long, pharmacology course in the near future.
 
I appreciate the heck out of the input everyone's taken the time to throw down. @Remi my instructor has been really good about proactively handing us a lot of outside resources for pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, so I'm glad to know that he has the right idea. Seems I'm in good hands there. @Akulahawk and @joshrunkle35 , sounds like your brains operate sort of like mine. The grouping idea, as well as the spreadsheet tactic seem like great ways to go. I'll try those out.

Mostly, I'm just glad to know that it's nearly universally agreed that this is probably the single hardest part of the "book smarts" element of Paramedic. Makes me feel better about the sheer amount of slogging I'm doing to get it all down.
 
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