Pharm Studying

Do you have your pharm text?

I'm not a huge fan of flashcards in the traditional cut them out and flip them over sense, but music made some awesome ones which I read through on the PC and helped me through my program. They are located here: Pharm flashcards

Your professor is right about drug categories. Make a chart of the drugs by categories and learn the suffixes, indications, and method of action. Once you get that down add on the contraindications, drug/food/herb interactions, side effects, and adverse effects. By learning the suffixes you know that the "pril" means it is an ACE inhibitor and all the side effects etc even if you didn't cover that drug specifically in lectures. Studying by category is the way to go for the most part. There are some drugs that are special and have especially important to know adverse effects separate from the rest of the drugs in the category, but you will most likely learn those specifically.

I made the mistake of trying to learn individual meds at first. Definitely focus on the groups of suffixes and prefixes, what they fall into, and what are the major side effects, purposes, and nursing interventions for each class. For example, "-olol" is a beta-blocker (i.e. Propranolol, Metroprolol, etc). Know what beta-blockers are used for, what their major side effects are, and what major things you would want to consider as a nurse caring for a patient on beta-blockers. Do this for all the major categories. If your school utilizes ATI, they have an excellent list that breaks them down. Having this core knowledge will make it easy for you to tackle understanding drugs you've never seen before.

I didn't do flash-cards, but I made some humungous charts and tables. Same idea. Learn the prototype drug from each class, learn it backwards and forward. Then list the other drugs in that class and note only the ways in which they differ (if at all) from the prototype. That way, instead of learning 300 different drugs, you're really learning about 40... plus the names of the related medications.