Hi Everyone...please help

Problems with my computer. Posted twice. See post below. Sorry.

I've been a practicing nurse for 30 years. The meds I know best are the ones I work with all the time and am giving to patients. If you go to any of the Internet drugstore sites they most all list the top 100 or 200 best selling meds that the physicians are ordering these days. There are certain medications that are consistently ordered for specific diseases and conditions. Sometimes you can find those when looking for information about specific disease on the Family Practice Notebook website or the eMedicine website. If you like I can give you links to all these websites if you do not know how to find them yourself.

With your learning of medications, keep things as simple as you can. When I was in nursing school 32 years ago we all laughed when we were asked what the side effects of a drug were. "Nausea, vomiting and rash". That's pretty standard. Look for a unique side effect. Certain specific drugs have unique side effects and, sure as shootin', that's what you're likely to get a test question about. For example, I was just looking at this recently. . .a side effect of an antibiotic called vancomycin can result in a person's chest developing a bright red rash. It's called red man syndrome and is actually due to an allergy to the medication. However, red man syndrome is very specific to this drug. Do you understand?

here is a site i found recently that has drugs arranged by category rather than having to search for them by their names.

http://www.globalrph.com/druglist.htm

here is their home page

http://www.globalrph.com/ - has drug listings, instructions for iv dilutions in mixing piggyback meds, you can search for specific drugs (uses rxlist.com), or chose the drug table button to get lists of medications arranged by categories. clicking on the infectious disease button takes you to an infectious disease database arranged by disease which give you listings of antibiotic choices that can be used for treatment. there are a number of medical calculators here including one to calculate drip rates on some of the commonly used icu medications. there are also links to a video library.

and, here a site you can use to help you make nicely printed drug cards. if you know how to fomat your printer and scale down the card to a nice size (like i can't!), you'll be in business!

http://www.edruginfo.com/qthome.htm - e-druginfo.com's gateway page into medi-quik construct-a-card. you need to register, but it's free. you have to input all the information yourself. this constructor merely prints it onto a pre-formatted form. in playing around with the constructor i found that you could not go back otherwise you lost your input data. i was able to shrink the finished card down to about 7" x 5" but my printer didn't print any border. more likely, i just don't know how to apply a border or shrink the card down smaller! :imbar

here is another medication link:

http://www.brooksidepress.org/products/military_obgyn/pharmacy/medications.htm - a huge list of medications you can link to for information. contains a lot of commonly used ob/gyn medications. from a military source for ob/gyn