Any Advice for Pharmacology

Hello !

Studying pharm with just 5 days till your test date is pretty futile. The thing with pharm is that you could honestly study this subject for years upon years and STILL get a drug on your NCLEX that you have never heard of before in your life. =)

Many of the pharm questions on NCLEX (from my personal experience and passed on 2nd attemp) have some sort of context within the actual question that allows you to make a fairly educated answer based on the knowledge that you will already have acquired from nursing school and from your kaplan studies. But then you will also get NCLEX questions that literally just tell you the name of some random drug and ask you what to watch out for (risks, side effects, etc). You would think that this style of question would be knowledge based and "below the competency line", but I had two of these types of pharm questions near the end of my test (and passed @75 questions) - never heard or seen these drugs in my life and will probably continue to never hear or see them for the rest of my nursing career.

People say to learn classes of drugs rather than individual drugs. This is good advice, however it too has its limitations. This will only work if your NCLEX question provides context and you can deduce the classification of the drug from reading the stem. If the question has no (or very little) context, this doesn't work - you still would basically need to memorize the NAME of every single possible drug WITHIN the class that you are studying in order to identify it - which is completely impossible. Studying suffixes is helpful too, but there are MANY exceptions to the suffix rules.

However....having said all that...that are certain drugs that you should definitely take the time to learn and memorize, or make sure you already know before your test.

* Digoxin (know this drug backwards and forwards)

* Lithium (know this drug backwards and forwards)

* Nitroglycerin (know everything there is to know about this drug)

* Methylphenidate

* The name of all the antiplatelets and anticoags (including prusagrel, rivaroxaban, apixaban, etc, etc)

* Beta blockers, ACE's, ARBS, Calicum Channel Blockers

* Asthmatic drugs (fluticason, salmeterol, albuterol, ipratropium, tiotriopium, etc, etc)

* Statins

* Benztropine

* Radio active iodine and levothyroxine backwards and forwards (most commonly prescribed drug in the US)

* drugs ending in -fil, like sildenafil and tadalafil (these are some of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the US)

* MAOI, SSRI, benzos

* the 4 drugs given for TB (rifapentine, isoniazid, ethambutol, pyrazinamide)

* common antidotes: vitamin K, flumazenil, naloxone, protamine sulfate, activated charcoal for salicylates, etc,

* common diuretics: bumetanide, hydrochlorothiazide, chlorthalidone, spironolactone, etc,

I understand that pharm can seem like such a monumental subject....but just put faith in the pharmacology content that you know is already up in your head...and brush up on the most important stuff (above). You got this!! Good luck on your test. Please keep us posted!

There is a pharmacology audiobook that can help you, I can't post the name because that's advertising, but it's a best seller in "Nursing Pharmacology" on Amazon.com

The last poster was right to focus on certain drugs, but it's not true that you can't learn a lot about pharmacology in a few days, the audiobook will teach you much of what you need to know while you are doing other things.

The -fil is not the correct ending, it is either -afil for PDE5s like tadalafil, vardenafil, and sildenafil, and the substem in vardenafil and sildenafil is "den" to make -denafil.

Here is the drug ending website:

Generic Name Stems - Drug Information Portal - U.S. National Library of Medicine

Good luck, think you can or think you can't, and you're right.