While the UK and United States have different methods for assessing their health professionals often the calculations and math(s) strategies are the same. I invite you to enjoy this 12-part series on Part 2 of preparing for the Pre-Reg exam but will also help those in the states that are looking to improve their skills in nursing, pharmacy technician, and pharmacist skills. Here's the Memorizing Pharmacology book link: https://www.audible.com/pd/Memorizing-Pharmacology-Audiobook/B09JVBHRXK?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-281667&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_281667_rh_us

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Auto Generated Transcript:

Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, pharmacist and author of the Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/p/mobile. Let’s get started with the show.

I’ll just read it. The following hospital prescription is written for a seven-year-old child weighing 24 kilograms. The one translation I made or conversion factor I created was reminding you what 10 really means when you have a weight per volume. It’s 10 grams per 100 mLs, so you know 20 would be 20 grams per 100 mLs, and then 0.5 grams per kilogram. Normally I use yellow, but for whatever reason yellow didn’t come up against that gray background.

The infusion rates, this gets a little bit confusing, so I left it that way, although I really don’t like seeing it that way with two forward slashes. When we see a fraction, we usually we’re used to seeing a numerator over denominator, but here we have a numerator over a denominator and then another four slash. It just makes it a little confusing, but really at 0.6 mL over kilograms and then hours is also a denominator, so those are both on the bottom and we’ll see how that works when we’re doing our conversions.

How about what we have are three times and then when I say times I mean that quite literally. And let me get my pointer out here. I mean 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 30 minutes, but then an unknown and that’ll be kind of the twist at the end here that makes it a little bit tougher. But what is the total infusion duration of the immunoglobulin if it is infused at the prescribed rate? Well, we know it’s 30 plus 30 plus 30 plus something and we want it to the whole minute, so that’ll also be part of our conversion.

But the first thing to do I think is just say all right well I know eventually I’m going to have to know how many mLs I’m infusing total and I don’t really have that set up right now so let’s go look at that. All right so I have a 24 kilogram seven-year-old child and 0.5 grams per one kilogram. 100 mL per 10 grams equals the mLs. And I mentioned again I prefer to go right to left so if I see mLs I need a conversion factor that has mLs. Well this one didn’t have mLs but this one does so I put the 100 mLs over 10 grams and then I need to get rid of this gram because the gram is not over here so I see 0.5 grams over kilograms and I don’t see kilograms over here so I need to get rid of it and I get rid of 24 kilograms so then we cross out diagonally our units. I’ll get rid of the kilograms, get rid of the grams and we’re left with the mLs. So the total infusion will be 120 mLs.

Okay so that’s a nice number to work with and we’ll see we’re going to be able to figure out the infusion quantities for the first three but we’re going to need this 120 for our fourth infusion quantity. So there are two ways you could do this. And I mentioned this long way versus short way. The short way is to recognize that you’re going from 0.6 to 1.2 to 2.4 and you’re really doubling and then doubling again. Okay so you could really just put it over here and go 0.6 plus 1.2 plus 2.4 is going to end up at 4.2.

Or you can go through each of them and say okay well this one’s going to be 7.2 mLs and this one would be 14.4 and this would be 28.8 all together though we end up with the same product that we’re gonna or sum that we’re going to have 50.4 mLs.

So again if we have mLs as something that I’m looking for I need to have my conversion factor of mLs over kilograms per hour and as I mentioned we have that strange denominator one on the bottom so we need to multiply by kilograms and by hours because there’s no hours over here in the answer.

Okay so we can do that three times. I can get this 50.4 so if we’ve used 50.4 so far we know the total is 120 from the last equation that we did then the infusion quantity for the fourth segment is 120 mL minus 50.4 or 69.6 mLs. But unfortunately that’s not what the question asked. The question wanted to know what’s the total infusion duration. So we have that one of the unknowns known now now that we’ve calculated the 69.6 mLs and we can put plug that in.

So instead of having the hours here where we knew it was 0.5 of an hour or 30 minutes we know the answer we know it’s 69.6 mLs is the total amount so what we do is we do a little bit of rearranging here and we see that we’re going to have to move the 24 over so 1 over 24 when you move it from the left to the right and then again we have to move the 4 under the kilograms per hour and then when we do this calculation eventually we come up with 0.725 hours.

So I know you could just do 0.725 times 60 but I still like to do the entire thing to make sure that I’ve got the right factors so 0.725 hours times 60 minutes over one hour makes 43.5 minutes. So we already had our 90 at the very beginning of the question, we just need to add our 43.5 minutes to get 133.5 rounded to the nearest whole minute as per the question or 134 minutes.

So just one kind of caveat that if you’re filling in answers it sounds like you would want to go through the entire test and make sure that every answer is done properly here because you could have just left it at 133.5 and then gone on to the next but I want to make sure that we’re attentive to the actual question.

Thanks for listening to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. You can find episodes, cheat sheets, and more at memorizingfarm.com. Again, you can sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/p/mobile. Thanks again for listening.

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If you need an online asynchronous pharmacology course, go here: https://www.dmacc.edu/programs/pdp/pre-pharmacy/Pages/online-pharmacology-class.aspx 

If you want pre-med and college advising through the new 1-credit online course I teach, SDV 108, you can go here: https://www.dmacc.edu/schedule/Pages/result.aspx?Term=202401&Subject=SDV course 11395 I'm Anthony Guerra.

Find the book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

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Everyone knows you can save a ton of money going to community college instead of a four year school, but do schools look down on it? While some do, Harvard accepts community college classes, so it's reasonable under our current economic conditions that it's a good choice. 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, pharmacist and author of the Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet, or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/p/mobile. Let’s get started with the show.

Hey, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. Our pharmacology course is half full here at Des Moines Area Community College for fall, so as you’re going through summer, if you feel like you may not make it, see if you can’t enroll again. It only takes a day. You just become a guest student, but you’re welcome to sign up for pharmacology there if you are maybe pre-med or pre-pharmacy or pre-something.

This fall is the first time I’m going to be teaching SDV 108, which is Student Development 108: The College Experience. It’s normally like an orientation course to the college, but because I’ve always helped pre-professional students, whether it’s PT school or pharmacy school or med school and all that stuff, a lot of those students like to join me. So it’s SDV 108 and it’s section WWT. If you want to get that kind of advice about what courses to take and those types of things, I can help you there. It’s just a one-credit online class and anybody can take it.

Something I’ll talk about a little bit more as well is cross enrollment, which is if you are a full-time student at DMACC, you’re welcome to take one course up to three credits at Drake, Iowa State, or Grandview in the fall and spring semester. And what that does is it makes not only their advisors available to you, you get I think even an email to the college, but what it allows you to do is kind of one, see if that’s maybe a college that you’d like to go to to finish up your four years, but what it also does is it reduces the limit. So when you’re applying or going to another four-year school, there’s only so many classes you can take at a community college and I think it’s around 64 credits. And what this does is it gives you four-year degree credits and so that means that if you were to do that for three semesters, let’s say, that would be nine fewer credits that nine more credits you could take at community college because you took them at a four-year school. And again, those courses are free if you take them at the other college.

So what I wanted to get into now is the actual pre-med curriculum. I think there’s a lot of confusion about it and so what I’m going to do is I’m going to actually show you the courses that you would take here at DMACC. And again, you have to be very careful because each med school is a little bit different and you’re going to apply to probably I think the average is about 15 med schools that people apply to. So you kind of start with your first choice and make sure that you’ve kind of taken enough courses for most of them. And I’ll go through it but I’ll show you what two years of pre-med would look like at a community college.

So let’s just open up this Excel file and what I’ve done is I’ve put them all in four semesters. I wouldn’t recommend this. This is a very very challenging experience and what I’m going to do after I talk to you about the DMACC pre-med classes is I’m going to show you the exact courses I actually took and the way it actually worked out for me which was not this clean. This makes it look like you just go for four semesters then you go and get a four-year degree and all as well. This will get you an associate of science two-year degree here at DMACC but again 17 credit classes with these types of classes are very challenging. I would spread it out and I’ll talk about that a little bit.

So let’s start with the first and second semester: The College Experience or SDV 108, the class that I’m teaching this fall. I definitely think that you should take this class really early on because it ensures you’re taking the right classes. You’re not taking too many or too few, and you’ve got somebody that you can talk to every single week about your courses. As your thinking changes, you can also talk to your instructor about that.

The first thing we usually talk about is General Chemistry one and two. This is why you would want to take it in your first year of college and this is why you wouldn’t. If you took AP Chemistry and you just never took the test, or you had a really good experience with chemistry in high school and you’re very strong at math, then yeah, take Gen Chem. But if you don’t feel so strong about math or college, then I might hold off on taking Gen Chem until later.

Even Iowa State, which is where more students from DMACC go than any other public college in this state, considers Organic Chemistry a junior level class. So you could take Gen Chem here in the second year and then take Organic up there. Or you could take classes at both. There’s nothing that says that once you’re done with Community College, you have to go and only take classes at a four-year school. I’ve actually done some overlap and that sometimes is even better. We’re only 25 minutes apart so if you live in the middle, it’s 15 minutes to each.

But General Chemistry one, General Chemistry two, Chem 165, 175, here’s where it gets a little bit goofy with General Biology one and two because some of the schools want you to have Anatomy and Physiology and some of them are just like just have a Biology class or a specific class and some of them even want Genetics and things like that. But I’m just putting the General Biology one and General Biology two here just so you can see them.

Calculus is a bit of a difficult thing to put in the first semester because many students are not ready to take Calculus first semester. I had already taken it in the summer of my junior year as an audit and then I took it again in the fall and I passed it. And then I really struggled with Calculus two and I’ll talk about my story later but generally either Calculus one or Statistics, you know, you can pick which one. Statistics would probably be a better freshman year class or first semester Freshman Class than Calculus one.

And then maybe you’ve already taken Sociology or something like that again so important to have someone in your corner just kind of talking you through everything making sure that everything that you’ve done in high school aligns with what you’re doing in college and so forth.

The second year would be Organic Chemistry one, Organic Chemistry two, General Physics one, General Physics two and this is the non-Calculus based Physics that I’m talking about. And then Intro to Psych, Intro to Ethics, and then Principles of Microeconomics and  fundamentals of world communication, again, these hit all of the requirements for an associate of science degree. You might ask why I’m saying AES and not AA. Well, the Associate of Arts is really more humanities-based and pre-med is super science-based. So, an associate of science tends to hit all of the things. This is the same for pre-pharmacy, pre-physical therapy, and some other things like that.

The reason I talked about cross-enrollment is because we don’t have biochemistry as a junior year class here. But in that situation where you’ve got cross-enrollment, you would be able to take biochemistry at Iowa State University, which I believe is only three credits without the lab. Often they don’t even want the lab one, they just want that you’ve taken biochemistry. That is a possibility and I believe you would actually take the class for free although you’d have to pay for your own books.

Here’s where it comes down to biology. Does the school want anatomy and phys1, anatomy and phys2? Are you thinking about a biology degree? Those are each four credits, micro was four credits. Then I teach a pharmacology class because it’s amazing that you take so many classes for pre-med but so few of them actually help you with medical school. Biochemistry would, pharmacology would to some extent, organic chemistry does to some extent, psych does but really many of the classes have very little to do with the actual course content you’ll have in med school.

Many of the students that I have also are either going to be nursing majors or they’re thinking about physician assistant. But that’s what it looks like on the page where you’re going to have four semesters get your two-year degree all as well. I’m going to show you what it really looks like.

This is what pre-med really looks like, well at least it did for me. Don’t worry about the years, it’s a long time ago but it’s actually amazingly the same. The summer that I was between my junior and senior year I thought I might want to be an engineer. I thought might want to be a physician again. I really didn’t know what these were as I have nobody in my family that was in these professions. My parents were both in computers and I just said okay well let me go see what a college class is like.

I’d never been in a college classroom before and I audited calculus one where I would go to class. I didn’t take the tests, I could have if I wanted to but the reason why I audited it was because I had an engineering camp in the middle of classes and so there’s no way I would have passed the class if I had taken it for credit.

So by auditing it, I got to know a little bit about courses and that made things a lot easier in the fall. I’d already been in the class, I kind of knew what was going on and then I ended up with a B but then I’d never gotten anything lower than a C.

I did get a D in my midterm but I brought it up to a C in one time but I’d never gotten anything below a C and all of a sudden I got an F in calculus 2. That’s a really bad thing for two reasons and it was unnecessary.

Firstly, I recognized that I was not passing the class early enough that I could have withdrawn so the most important thing I can tell you here is that it’s better to take a W than it is to take an F.

If you look at the rest of my courses you’ll see I’ve taken three W’s no F’s because I learned my lesson and maybe I had to learn my lesson that way but taking a five credit F is a really bad thing if you know and and did manage to get out of it by doing so well on the entrance exam.

Let me talk more about this in a little bit so then I go on to four-year School in the University of Florida and you know Three B’s and two two A’s.

I did well in chemistry and micro and my honors class and then brought my calculus one grade up to an A. You might ask why did you take that again didn’t you already take calculus? And yes, indeed, did and thought that well maybe what happened with Calculus 2 was i didnt “Learn it well enough,” I said. "Alright, let me take it again and see if I’ve learned it better. Maybe that’s the thing, but I found out that’s not really the case. What had happened was, I just wasn’t focused. It was my senior year of high school. I just wasn’t as focused as I needed to be to pass a course like that. So, I’ll talk about when I did actually pass it later. Okay, let me maybe make these a little bit bigger. I think it’s a little bit tough to see at the font I’m working at right now.

So there we go. Now you can kind of see them a little bit better and I can make that even bigger there. Alright, so that was my experience in first semester. I did well, it was about a 3.4 or 3.5 GPA, I think it was closer to a 3.4. Then I really struggled in the spring and I learned from that calculus mistake that okay, when you’re struggling and you’ve got a lot of responsibilities in a semester, then maybe it’s time to let something go.

What I did was, I said okay well, I’m actually enjoying this bio lab. It’s tough to take the lab without the course but I still got a C plus and chem lab, I got a C plus and Kim, I got a B. So again, I was struggling a bit with chemistry. I realized that maybe that was too many credits and you know, I took the honors class, took the writing class, did okay but again it was more like uh…I think it was maybe a 2.9 or a 3.1 somewhere around there but it was not a good GPA compared to the 3.4.

But again, I persisted and kept going and my GPA was not ruined by failing biology; that was the key. Okay so then then you know, I realized that man having all those labs was just absolutely devastating so I was like, ‘I’m going to take a semester with no labs.’ So integrated bio one wasn’t…I already taken the lab so I got a C Plus organic, got a B and organic was a bear but the way they do it at Florida is they put the two lab credits in the second semester none in the first.

Then I had my honors class uh…General psych, did okay and then stats…I really struggled with stats…the math…I just understood calculus better than stats and it just was a thing where I just wasn’t that great at it.

Okay and then this was my really bad semester and I think a lot of us have this where you know it’s just fatigue…I think whereas just like man…I really don’t know where I’m going…I don’t know that um…this pre-med journey or pre-professional journey is something I really want…I don’t even really have a major…I think my major was chemistry if you were to like look at my transcript.

And see what’s his major? I think it was chemistry but I really didn’t know what was going on and this was just a survival semester so…I got a C in BIO two, C in bio2 lab, D plus an organic two, C in the lab, C plus in philosophy class and…I was just like…I cannot do physics on top of all of this.

So that was really really a low point and two things had me move: first the University of Florida if you’re an honor student you get what was At least at the time, I had an out-of-state tuition waiver, so I was paying in-state prices. And at in-state prices, it was better and cheaper to go to Florida than it was to go to my home school of Maryland. But then once that tuition waiver was gone, Maryland actually became a little bit cheaper. But the other thing was I kind of needed a fresh start. I needed a new environment and I was like, you know what, let’s do this over and see how I can do. Okay, so I transferred to the University of Maryland College Park.

And you know, you say, okay, well, they’re going to go easy on you or whatever. No, absolutely not. This is my first semester at the University of Maryland: organic chemistry 2. I had to retake the lab because although I passed the lab, organic chemistry doesn’t come without a lab at Maryland, so I had to take that. I took calculus 2 and then I took the first semester of a three-semester calculus-based physics. You don’t have to do that for med school. I just didn’t know. I’m like, well, maybe I’ll still be an engineer. It just took me on my third year to get to calculus 2. I mean, I was taking calculus and organic and physics and I took them all in the same semester. And then I took intro to theater. And I think it’s crazy that I get a B in theater and I get a B in organic, right? And calculus and physics. Like, I’m really proud of that 3.0. Like, it was, I recovered from my bad fourth semester there at Florida. I was back on the right track and all that stuff.

And right around here was when I kind of discovered that maybe I’m going to try other health professions. And that’s when I looked into physical therapy and physician assistant and pharmacy. And with pharmacy, I could actually go to a pharmacy on campus and volunteer. And that’s what ended up being my major.

So I ended up going in spring and signing up for the other physics that I had to take. But then this happens to a lot of people: you’re like, well, I’ve already kind of taken everything. So all I was doing was saying if I don’t get into pharmacy school, I’m still going to want to get a degree. And I could still get a BA in chemistry or a BA or a BS in biology. So I still was on track to get a degree of some kind or another.

And what I did was: I took my Shakespeare and took my required English class or literature class and took microbiology because even if I don’t need it, I can still take it. And I actually really enjoyed micros like one of the very few A’s I got in my college career. But for some reason microbiology is very hands-on, very great. We had a great teaching assistant, great professor. I really enjoyed it.

Physics was still a struggle and I made the shift: I was like, “I am not taking calculus-based physics again.” Like, “I really just…my engineering dreams were dashed.” Like “Okay, I’m not getting a BS in chemistry,” which is different than a BA. “I’m not getting…not going to become an engineer.” Let’s just take the non-calculus based physics 2 and move on.

And then also took biochemistry and what happened was: “I got my acceptance so early that” “I was like well” “I don’t really need biochem.” “I can still go to class but” “I don’t need the stress of trying to pass biochem and physics at the same time.” And “I was really worried about not passing physics.” So this may seem strange but it’s better to withdraw from a class that you aren’t going to pass and pass the one that you need so that you can keep moving forward because if “I hadn’t passed physics” “I either would have to take it in summer if they would conditionally accept me or” “I might have to wait another year.” So “I was like alright well let’s let’s just go to biochem class” “I’m not gonna” “I’m just gonna audit it.” And “I must not have filled out the paperwork to audit it.” “I meant to audit it but” “I ended up withdrawing from it.” And then B in Shakespeare, A in micro, C in physics and then “I made it on to pharmacy school.” At least at the time, I had an out-of-state tuition waiver, so I was paying in-state prices. And at in-state prices, it was better and cheaper to go to Florida than it was to go to my home school of Maryland. But then once that tuition waiver was gone, Maryland actually became a little bit cheaper. But the other thing was I kind of needed a fresh start. I needed a new environment and I was like, you know what, let’s do this over and see how I can do. Okay, so I transferred to the University of Maryland College Park.

And you know, you say, okay, well, they’re going to go easy on you or whatever. No, absolutely not. This is my first semester at the University of Maryland: organic chemistry 2. I had to retake the lab because although I passed the lab, organic chemistry doesn’t come without a lab at Maryland, so I had to take that. I took calculus 2 and then I took the first semester of a three-semester calculus-based physics. You don’t have to do that for med school. I just didn’t know. I’m like, well, maybe I’ll still be an engineer. It just took me on my third year to get to calculus 2. I mean, I was taking calculus and organic and physics and I took them all in the same semester. And then I took intro to theater. And I think it’s crazy that I get a B in theater and I get a B in organic, right? And calculus and physics. Like, I’m really proud of that 3.0. Like, it was, I recovered from my bad fourth semester there at Florida. I was back on the right track and all that stuff.

And right around here was when I kind of discovered that maybe I’m going to try other health professions. And that’s when I looked into physical therapy and physician assistant and pharmacy. And with pharmacy, I could actually go to a pharmacy on campus and volunteer. And that’s what ended up being my major.

So I ended up going in spring and signing up for the other physics that I had to take. But then this happens to a lot of people: you’re like, well, I’ve already kind of taken everything. So all I was doing was saying if I don’t get into pharmacy school, I’m still going to want to get a degree. And I could still get a BA in chemistry or a BA or a BS in biology. So I still was on track to get a degree of some kind or another.

And what I did was: I took my Shakespeare and took my required English class or literature class and took microbiology because even if I don’t need it, I can still take it. And I actually really enjoyed micros like one of the very few A’s I got in my college career. But for some reason microbiology is very hands-on, very great. We had a great teaching assistant, great professor. I really enjoyed it.

Physics was still a struggle and I made the shift: I was like, “I am not taking calculus-based physics again.” Like, “I really just…my engineering dreams were dashed.” Like “Okay, I’m not getting a BS in chemistry,” which is different than a BA. “I’m not getting…not going to become an engineer.” Let’s just take the non-calculus based physics 2 and move on.

And then also took biochemistry and what happened was: “I got my acceptance so early that” “I was like well” “I don’t really need biochem.” “I can still go to class but” “I don’t need the stress of trying to pass biochem and physics at the same time.” And “I was really worried about not passing physics.” So this may seem strange but it’s better to withdraw from a class that you aren’t going to pass and pass the one that you need so that you can keep moving forward because if “I hadn’t passed physics” “I either would have to take it in summer if they would conditionally accept me or” “I might have to wait another year.” So “I was like alright well let’s let’s just go to biochem class” “I’m not gonna” “I’m just gonna audit it.” And “I must not have filled out the paperwork to audit it.” “I meant to audit it but” “I ended up withdrawing from it.” And then B in Shakespeare, A in micro, C in physics and then “I made it on to pharmacy school.”

I had worked in such difficult classes though because the Pharmacy College admissions test only tested calculus one and really mostly first semester organic chemistry. And I was so far ahead of that that I scored a 99th percentile overall. It’s unusual for someone to be so strong in English as I was but I just had you know kind of a passion for it. So I did really well on my entrance exam. And this is back when it was harder to get into pharmacy school than Medical School. The numbers were much higher.

Believe it or not, back in the late 80s, there was actually a glut of Physicians. That is, there were too many Physicians and it just was not necessarily the most desirable field to get into as it is now. You have to have a 3.8 cumulative, 3.5 or 3.6 overall when you’re looking at med school as far as the GPA.

But this is what I want to show you is that since I was kind of a chemistry major and maybe I would have ended up being a chemistry teacher or biology teacher and I was gonna finish that chemistry degree but then I did four years of pharmacology or pharmacy school. I’m like well, I already kind of did a chemistry degree like do I really want to finish that? And so I decided much later that you know I would like to finish my bachelor’s degree but I really did like the Shakespeare class and the writing classes and the theater class and all that stuff.

So let’s take a look at my English major which I did finish at Iowa State which is an engineering school. It’s just so funny. But I want you to look at the grades: the only A- I received in my English classes was in grammar. So you know my inability to do those, I just could not put grammar together in a way that I could get the full A.

And so when you’re looking at the best major for pre-med, the reality is that many of us are going to struggle with those chemistry classes right? And this hard science is and there’s a reason they’re called the hard Sciences.

But what I did was in that second half of things is I got all A’s. So if you were to add up all of my grades, basically, I had about a 3.0 from undergrad first and second year and then I had almost a four point on the second. I would have been around a 3.5. And yeah, I would have been on the way low side of things but my strength has always been in test taking.

So if I had taken the MCAT, I think it would have done well. The reason I can say that is that I did take the GRE and I scored in the 98th percentile in English and the 87th percentile in math which is really really unusual usually like the engineers scored 99 in math and like you know low on English and then the English major score high on English but low in math.

So, by completing an English degree by completing a hard science degree, everything came out a lot better. And then now, looking at my life, now, I’m really more of an author and a teacher because of these classes that I took in the liberal arts.

There are a couple of things I did want to talk about with this degree is that some of the courses I took here when as a community college professor because I was like huh, “I get to take free classes.” And “I’d always been interested in taking literature.” So “I started taking some lit classes creative writing classes” um just you know when “I wasn’t working.”

And then “I also was like well” “I have to get this language requirement.” And “I don’t remember if there was a language requirement with this particular college with Iowa state but” “I was like okay well” “let me just see if” “I can pass the test.” And so “the CLEP test” “I spoke enough Spanish” “that” “I was able to get through immediate intermediate Spanish too.” And “I got those 12 credits for a hundred dollars.” Like “that was all” “I needed to do.”

But again, “I think” “the combination of taking a course” “the pre-med coursework with a major like English or history or those types of things which actually have a much higher acceptance rate than med school than biology major does.” It makes you much more balanced and it makes things a lot easier because there are other things you also need to be able to do in that med application which is you need to be good at the interview, you need to be good in writing your letter and all of those things. And obviously, an English major is going to write an amazing med school letter.

So, I’ll go back to that page of the DMACC as and kind of maybe shrink it up a little bit so you can see it all on one page. But really, this whole idea that people actually complete this in this way is unusual. It’s much more likely that a rising junior senior in high school is going to have completed many of these classes. You want to kind of look at them in a way that is going to work well with your school.

And so the last thing I wanted to point out was there’s always that kind of talk about, do colleges take Community College classes? And this is the AAMC document guidance documents for 2024 and here’s the University of Iowa and they say we have no problem with Community College classes. That’s fine, you go ahead and take them. You say okay well that’s Iowa, that’s a state school, that’s fine. What about more prestigious schools? Alright, let’s look at Harvard. Harvard said Community College classes, those will be just fine. That’ll be great. Online courses maybe not. Community College classes yeah if you go to them that’s great.

So when you’re looking at the colleges or Med schools that you’re looking at it’s actually much more rare that a college would not want Community College classes because community colleges represent if you’re a minority student we represent half of minority students going into college like we’re just much more diverse we just are. Many reasons socioeconomic for one of them but there are many reasons why we have that.

But the other thing is I just don’t know why you would want to take an organic chemistry class where you have 300 people in the class versus where you have 24 people in the class. I mean that you literally would it is impossible in a DMACC for you to be more than 30 feet from the professor like you physically cannot like you would have to leave the room.

Like I just don’t understand why you would want to be all the way back in an organic chemistry class trying to pass that class in a much larger section. So I understand why some people might say oh well it’s easier well it’s easier because it’s easier to get help there’s only one Professor. I mean maybe there’s a bunch of TAs but how long have they been teaching? All the professors here we don’t have grad students here we all are have doctorates and so forth.

So I just think that I’m really bullish on Community College as a way to get these classes and to move in especially with the way things have been going with expenses and things. I mean seriously 175 dollars a credit hour, you can go to college here for less than five thousand dollars a year so your total cost of tuition is less than ten thousand dollars here to get a degree. For some of you, that’s a quarter or a semester or a part of a semester.

So again I’m you know,  I really think it’s a great opportunity that you can have taking community college credits. And one last thing that I want to point out is, as I was doing this pre-med thing, I wasn’t like, “I’m gonna be a doctor, burn the ships,” and all of that. I was saying, “I might want to be an engineer physician.” And then as I’m kind of going through this, I’m like, “Well, I’m struggling and I’m learning how to do this. Maybe I might want to be a teacher,” which I ended up being eventually. So maybe I could be a chemistry teacher or biology teacher or something like that, maybe even a math teacher. I finally get through calculus three which I heard is easier in calculus two.

So you know, I know I went to almost 30 minutes in this episode but I really just wanted to let you know that when you’re thinking about pre-med, don’t feel like everybody actually gets it right. Like that you never see what other people do. It’s actually much different and it’s actually probably a much more zigzag path than it is just this straight and narrow take these classes go to med school live a perfect life and so forth.

So need my help? Well, Tony the pharmacist at gmail.com happy to help you out. Thanks for listening to the memorizing pharmacology podcast. You can find episodes cheat sheets and more at memorizingfarm.com. Again, you can sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile. Thanks again for listening.

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Sometimes it's tough to figure out how to calculate your grade during the semester, but once your grades are in with only a single grade left, your final, it's easy as a single equation below which are the examples I did in the video. 

FE = Final Exam Grade Needed

RG = Required Passing Grade

FW = Final Exam Weight Percent as Decimal (.30, .20, . . . )

CG = Current Grade

 

FE = RG – ((1 – FW) x CG)) / (FW)

FE = 77 – ((1 - .30) x 100) / (.30)

FE = 77 – (70 ) / .30

FE = 7 / .30

FE = 23%

 

FE = RG – ((1 – FW) x CG)) / (FW)

FE = 77 – ((1 - .30) x 70) / (.30)

FE = 77 – (49) / .30

FE = 28 / .30

FE = 93%

 

FE = RG – ((1 – FW) x CG)) / (FW)

FE = 77 – ((1 - .30) x 67) / (.30)

FE = 77 – (46.9) / .30

FE = 30.1 / .30

FE = 100.33%

Auto Generated Transcript::

Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, the pharmacist and author of The Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in Pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com.

Let’s get started with the show. This is a question that comes up a lot: How do I figure out what my final exam grade needs to be for me to pass the class? It depends on a couple of factors. What is your bar? Do you need to pass with an 85, 80, 75, or is a 73 passing like a C minus? So, what is needed to pass is the required passing grade.

First, you need to calculate what your final exam grade needs to be. Then we’ll figure out what is the required passing grade. This is usually set by your program. Then you want to know the final exam grade as a percent. So what we’re saying is, if your final exam is 30, you want to put 0.30. If your final exam is 20, then put 0.20, and so on.

The last one is what is your current grade? The current grade is going to be the opposite of the final exam weight and we just need that as a number.

Here’s the equation itself: The final exam grade needed is equal to the required passing grade minus (1 minus the final exam weight as a percent) times the current grade, divided by the final exam weight.

So what does this look like in practice? We’re saying that our final exam grade needed is going to be our required passing grade of 77 minus 70 divided by 0.3 which ends up being 7 divided by 0.3. This person has a 100 in the class going into the final and just needs a 23 percent.

So if there are four questions on multiple choice, it literally means that probability would say that if they picked all C they should pass with the final. But what might be is that you are actually below the line. So let’s say right now instead you have a 70 in the class, can you still pass the class? Well, the answer is yes.

So what we do is we put in a required grading and we’re just using 77 as a number which is a C plus or close to it. The 1 minus the FW (final exam weight) of 30 is going to be a 0.3 and that gives us 70 times 0.7 and then we multiply times the current grade and we’re just saying you have a C minus or 70 and then we end up with 49 over 0.3 our final exam weight so total you would need 28 out of 0.3 or a 93 percent to get a 77.

So in this case it actually helps you that the final exam is worth so much because it means that it’s still mathematically possible for you to pass the class where it becomes mathematically impossible to pass the class is right around 767 for something like this and we can do that calculation as well.

So let’s say at your school the passing is 85 instead of 77 it would be 85 minus (1 minus 0.3 times your current grade) right over 0.3 assuming that 30 percent is your final exam.

Again it’s very flexible you can change it however you need but the idea is to be able to go into the final exam knowing exactly where you stand in every class so that you can better divide your time so that you make sure that you spend most time on classes that you’re a little bit behind and a little bit less time on classes that you’re way ahead.

Thanks for listening to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast! You can find episodes, cheat sheets, and more at memorizingfarm.com again you can sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com.

Thanks again for listening!

Interested in Pharmacology?
Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

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David & Dwaine talkin' about

Memorizing words to songs

Bowling

Physical Therapy

Cutting Pharmacology Study Time in Half

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In this episode I go over why it takes so much longer to study for pharmacology than other classes and what to do about it. 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, pharmacist and author of the Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/p/mobile. Let’s get started with the show.

Okay, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I just wanted to teach you how to cut your pharmacology studying in half. So before I get started, online pharmacology class is still available. We opened up a second section because it looks like the first section might fill. So just go to DMACC, DMACC and then pharmacology PHR185 is the name of the class or the class number.

Okay, so what I want to do is just give you a quick example. So I live in North Ankeny and there is a grocery store HyVee that we go to and then there is also a South Ankeny HyVee. When you go to the North Ankeny HyVee, this is the one I know, this is the one I go to all the time, the groceries are on the left of the building. If I need something that is not grocery, I know it’s on the right of the building. But if my kids say, okay, well Dad we’re out of milk and orange juice and cheese or something like that, I know to go in the right part of the building. I know to go to the back refrigerator section and if it’s just milk I can just go to the registers and I can go to the back right. I can go get what I need and come right back out and be done. On the other Ankeny one, I would have to go all the way to the left side, go all the way to the back left and then come out in the left door.

So I just want to give you that quick example because when we talk about pharmacology and why I wrote the book Memorizing Pharmacology: A Relaxed Approach and you know somebody just put a comment on my YouTube video, hey you know thanks for cutting down my study time. That’s the whole point of mnemonics is to make it so that your time is much more efficient whether using the second edition or the first edition it doesn’t matter.

But when people say oh okay well it’s just about the endings and the suffixes and things like that, that is incomplete and I want to show you why. Okay so besides the endings and suffixes and things like that, what I’m looking at right now is you can go online look on Amazon and this is the free preview of the book and when you look at GI for example and we’re going to start with too much acid.

The first thing you would give somebody or something somebody would take is they just go to over-the-counter and just get some antacids and they take those and that would reduce the amount of acid in their stomach. Okay, the next thing they would go to is an H2 blocker. That is a little bit more potent, it’s going to last quite a bit longer than an antacid. It can be taken on a regular basis maybe two weeks if somebody is having chronic acid or chronic GERD or chronic reflux.

And then if they were to go into a situation where they were actually going to be treated with antibiotics and an acid reducer, it’s more likely you would get a proton pump inhibitor. Now yes I talk about the endings. The generic antacids are actually the same chemical name as generic names kind of unique in the way they do that. And what we do is we put calcium carbonate and magnesium hydroxide one is constipating one causes diarrhea we put those opposite each other and we put them in a pair.

Then for histamines we have cimetidine which is the first one that came out has all of the side effects and then famotidine which has many fewer side effects which is the newer one and then it has that new Zantac brand name in addition to Pepcid.

And then we go to our proton pump inhibitors esomeprazole and omeprazole you know the S and R if you need to get into that in your particular pharmacology class where you have the right hand and left hand but more important thing is that it is in an order.

So in same way that I would go into HyVee in North Ankeny HyVee and if I need to go get dairy and maybe a card for someone I would go into right side of store and then I would go into back right of store but then if I know I need to get like a frozen pizza or something I would know I’d go to middle of store and then if I need to go get some dessert or something like that back left of store If I needed to get some crab rangoons, you know, just a snack or something like that, they would be on the left of the store. And then maybe some Starbucks on the way out, left of the store. But if I go to the South Ankeny HyVee, that actually reverses almost. Because if I need to get dairy, it’s on the left hand side of the store. The Starbucks is in the middle of the store on the left side. And so maybe I would start there, kind of get that thing to go in your cart. And then I would put the pizza and the milk and everything and I would go get it on the left side of the store.

So what I’m telling you is that yes, okay, those prefixes, infixes and suffixes are helpful. But the more important thing is that you have a list that’s going to have things in order. And that order is how you’re supposed to learn it. And the order you’re going to want to learn it in is the one where, okay, what is the least invasive medication that we’re going to use? What is the next least invasive and so forth until you get to the very strongest medicine? Or with beta blockers, first generation, second generation, third generation. Calcium channel blockers, non-dihydropyridines versus dihydropyridines. Okay, when you talk about antihistamines, it’s going to be which ones are the non-sedating versus the sedating. The sedating came first and then the non-sedating came second. First generation, second generation.

What I’ve done is, the reason this can cut your time in half is that I’ve already done it for you. I’ve already told you this is what has allowed students to be successful in the past already. They’ve already found that this is the order that makes it so much easier for them. This is the order that makes sense for them. And for you visual learners, this is the one that you want to draw it and you want to draw this drug first, this drug second, this drug third. Or with something like the RAAS, the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, you would of course put something that is going to affect angiotensin II like an ACE first and then an ARB second because that’s what the order is going to be in the picture. Or with diuretics, you’re going to start with the glomerulus and you’re going to start with mannitol and then you’re going to go down the loop of Henle like a water slide. You’re going to come back up and you’re going to use furosemide and then you’re going to go to the distal convoluted tubule into hydrochlorothiazide and then you’re going to go into the collecting duct where you have spironolactone or eplerenone, those potassium-sparing diuretics.

There is an order for everything and the reason why it’s taking you so long to figure out pharmacology is because you are figuring out the order for yourself. You are reinventing the wheel. I’m telling you I’ve already done this. I’ve been teaching this for 15 years. The reason why so many people want to use this book and I want to say it’s close to almost 10 000 a year that will use this book is because I’ve already put everything in order for you.

And yes I get it, you’re gonna get some maybe some of your lectures are going to have like study notes for the exam and things like that but the question is and you can figure this out really quickly does the order match the order that I’ve put them in? Okay when you look at GI does it look like this is in an order from least to worst something like that?

Alright well if you got questions donateguerra@gmail.com but again the easiest way to do this use videos on YouTube or whether you get book Audible lets you get it for free if you’ve never had one with them before but if you are not doing things in an order that you’ve already established or somebody has established for you then you’re probably making it twice as hard as it needs to be. You’re spending twice as much time on pharmacology than you need to.

And I assure you it will make it so much easier because once you make this class take up less of your time you can spend more time on other classes and then you feel so much better because once you’ve made it so that okay now I’ve got enough time to do everything that’s when anxiety starts to go away. That’s when you start to feel confident. That’s when you’re helping your classmates and when you’re helping your classmates you’re learning it even better.

And we get on this kind of wheel of just success where it just builds on each other because now you’re helping other people learn and you totally remember it. Alright Tony the pharmacist gmail.com if you’ve got questions otherwise I will talk to you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. You can find episodes, cheat sheets and more at memorizingfarm.com. Again you can sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/p/mobile. Thanks again for listening.

Like to learn more?

Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ

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and subscribe to my YouTube Channel TonyPharmD here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses:  residency.teachable.com

Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics Pharmacology Mnemonics

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Free pharmacology audiobook if you've never had one with Audible before:

https://www.audible.com/pd/Memorizing-Pharmacology-Audiobook/B09JVBHRXK?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-281667&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_281667_rh_us

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses:  residency.teachable.com

These two words, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics, get confused; I wanted to put up a quick way to remember the difference. If you want a longer explanation, go to episode 21, pharmacology basics, in the NGN NCLEX Memorizing Pharmacology Playlist. 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Hey, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, your host. Always check the show notes to see if there’s a link. You may be able to get one of the Memorizing Pharmacology books for free if you’ve never been an Audible member before. Again, the best way to succeed in a Pharmacology class is to have already taken pharmacology, and any of these books can be listened to in a weekend or a week of going back and forth. So with that, welcome to the show.

In this episode 85 of Pharmacokinetics versus Pharmacodynamics Pharmacology Mnemonics, I wanted to make sure that you understand the difference between the two things but also how to remember what the difference is and what the important components of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics are.

Let’s start with what pharmacokinetics really is. It’s just a combination of two words: there’s pharmacology which is ‘pharmaco’ which is drugs and then ‘logy’ which is a study of, so study of drugs. Because with Latin we turn things around. Kinesiology is the study of movement. So if you know a Kinesiology major, you know they’re helping you work out in those things. So I’ve got my little owl here studying and then a runner here. So study of drugs and movement. So when you go to pharmacokinetics, it’s the study of drug movement.

Okay, so what does that mean practically? Well, there are four big pieces to it and there’s an order to it. So we want to use the ADME mnemonic: A for absorption, D for distribution, M for metabolism, and E for excretion. But what we also need to know which we don’t necessarily usually hear a mnemonic for is what each goes with.

So absorption goes with small intestine. That’s usually where it is. It’s not the stomach; actually, the most absorption is small intestine because there’s a lot more surface area there. Distribution is the blood; again blood is a tissue. Metabolism is the liver; then it goes to the kidney.

So we want to imagine this medication going into the small intestine being absorbed into the blood going to the liver and then being excreted from the kidney. So how do we remember that? I use ‘small I blinked’ as my mnemonic: so small I for small intestine, the B for blood, the L I N is in liver then and then K I D is the end of blinked.

I get that blink is spelled B L I N K E D not B L I N K I D but go with me here. So absorption distribution metabolism excretion is small intestine blood liver then kidney.

Pharmacodynamics though is pharmacology; we’ve got our owl studying study of drugs but Dynamics is a force that causes a system change effect so one of those forces would be like a storm so when we’re talking about pharmacodynamics we are talking about the effects of drugs okay so what effects is this drug going to have on the system which is your body okay so what we do is we have to figure out first is that drug an Agonist or an antagonist we won’t get into partial Agonist right now so an Agonist is one that will activate something so if you’ve taken an inhaler like albuterol ProAir HFA that is a beta Agonist that is going to activate your lungs and open them up an antagonist would be like a beta blocker like metoprolol that is going to affect your heart it’s going to block the hearts beta receptors reducing heart rate okay and then we get into you know how these can oppose each other if you get something like Propranolol which also lowers heart rate at the same time that it’s kind of blocking the lungs so we won’t get into that part but that’s pharmacodynamics okay and a really good way that I’ve always seen this presented is in relationships okay so when you have a relationship Dynamic you’re going to have a protagonist this is the hero and an antagonist this is the villain and if you’ve just seen um Mario Brothers which had Mario as the protagonist and Bowser as the antagonist then you get what I’m talking about one is a blocker one is an activator okay so in relationship Dynamics a person is receptive to the protagonist the hero and not to the antagonist and that conflict drives the story in pharmacodynamics we’re just changing the word the receptor is receptive to the drug Agonist not the antagonist and so the antagonist blocks the effect and then causes the opposite so let’s go back to our idea of the lungs and the heart if we have an Agonist that opens up the lungs the antagonist would close up the lungs if we have an antagonist that lowers heart rate then an Agonist would increase heart rate so let’s not use the words good and bad we’re just going to use the words Agonist and antagonist as activate or block okay but that’s what pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics are thanks for listening to the memorizing pharmacology podcast you can find episodes cheat sheets and more at memorizingfarm.com again you can sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile thanks again for listening sure!

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Failing Nursing Pharmacology and Pathophysiology on Reddit (How to Avoid This)

Nursing school is a balancing act, so the first semester is especially dangerous because you haven't set the way you work. In this episode, I talk a little bit about two courses that are especially difficult and how to get through them by getting ahead. 

Find the book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to TonyPharmD YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses:  residency.teachable.com

Auto Generated Transcript:

Hey, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Gary, your host. Always check the show notes to see if there’s a link. You may be able to get one of the Memorizing Pharmacology books for free if you’ve never been an Audible member before. Again, the best way to succeed in Pharmacology class is to have already taken pharmacology and any of these books can be listened to in a weekend or a week of going back and forth. So with that, welcome to the show.

I wanted to talk a little bit about this Reddit post where a student failed out of nursing school because they failed both pharmacology and pathophysiology. The way that it works is they needed a 78 to pass and they got a 70 in both classes which traditionally you know you pass with a C and that’s a C minus or something like that. What happened though is that the school doesn’t let you fail more than one class.

I want to talk a little bit about first of all why it happens in these two classes because it tends to be patho and farm and what you can do about it and then what you can do to really prevent it. First things first, tremendous empathy to someone who has the courage to take three tries to get admitted to a school and then struggles this way.

It’s a really strange thing to say it’s better to get let’s say you’re taking five classes which I think she was but it’s better to get 577s than it is to get four A’s and one seventy and certainly to get three A’s and two seventies. What is I feel like a little bit difficult first is taking farm and patho in first semester when you haven’t really kind of gotten a hold of what’s going on with professional school and how you really want to adjust that’s pretty tough.

I find that it’s a lot easier to get prepared for pharmacology than it maybe is to get prepared for pathophysiology so pathophysiology again it really kind of depends on how strong your anatomy and physiology courses were and then with pharmacology you can do a couple of things. You can actually take pharmacology before pharmacology and you can also study it through some books and things like that.

In this episode, I just wanted to kind of talk about first of all there’s a lot of positive vibes to comfort this student but let me just kind of talk a little bit about what I’ve got going on now. For the new NGN NCLEX, I created a playlist on YouTube and you can just always listen to the podcast but what’s gonna happen is I’m gonna have so many episodes that it is going to start getting a little bit mired in this way.

You can just kind of either see what the episodes are and make your own playlist or you can just kind of go down the playlist to make sure that you’re getting all the pieces that you need. It’s just called NGN NCLEX Memorizing Pharmacology playlist on Tony Farm D and again free to anybody, you’re welcome to use it. I’ll continue to build this out over the summer and should be done by August where I feel really comfortable about having a ton of information on there for you.

If you just want a book to help you out it kind of depends if you’re like the student who is going into first semester pharmacology. The way Audible does it is you can just get the book for free and if you don’t like Audible in the first 30 days, you can cancel no questions asked and then they charge you like 15 bucks a month.

So it’s really just do you want to have those extra books do you want to have access not just get the books you buy but also get a ton of other books that that you’re able to get too so they kind of just depends if you’re somebody that is a commuter or somebody that has a lot of time not a lot of time but a lot of time where they are commuting or working out or those types of things and audio works for you so Memorizing Pharmacology, the second edition or the first edition first edition is just one that people just like the narrator again I kept a British narrator with the second edition, but some people still prefer the first and then memorizing pharmacology mnemonics. If you’re a little bit more advanced or maybe you’re going into PA school or you’re going into pharmacy school and the brand names are really a big deal, that could also be one for you. And then if you want something really short, it’s only like three hours. Good night Farm will give you 350 branded generic names. It’s really more just the mnemonics but there’s one more where, you know, it’s 18 hours of pharmacology if you really want that. And that’s questions answers and rationales books one to seven. So, you know, the first step maybe just take the free book for a couple of weeks, listen to it. The books were usually like six or seven hours, so it’s reasonable that you could finish in that time and decide you don’t want to continue and that’s fine. If you want something a little bit more, you can do the self-paced pharmacology course. It’s got the quizzes and the videos and that’s really for someone that feels like they don’t need a full Preparatory course like out of college but still want to have the videos. They still want to have quizzes. They still want to have something that kind of continues on with them. And then the last is really if you want to have the accountability of actually having a class in the summer, it’s only 10 weeks so it’s pretty quick. Goes middle of May to just before just beginning of August and that’s PHR185 pharmacology at DMACC again. It doesn’t matter what state you’re in, it’s online tuition so there’s no charges for being out of state or I don’t even think there are charges for being out of country. So if you’re in Canada and want to do these, you know, you can do them as well but you’ll just email me if you’ve got a question at a-a-g-u-e-r-r-a at dmacc.edu. Happy to help you. You really just click in to become a guest student. It takes a day there’s no transcripts or anything like that it’s just here I’m here for one class or I’m here for one or two classes and this can help you. And I’ve said over and over but really to succeed at pharmacology, you have to have taken pharmacology and really this is just saying imagine if instead of just going right into a medical Spanish class for example, you actually got to go to Spain or Latin America or Mexico for a couple of weeks and instead of just taking a class, you were actually reading the signs and going and ordering things and talking with people about the words and then you took the class. And that’s what these books and what the courses and all that is about is that when you get into the class that it’s a lot easier because you’ve already seen it before now. The bigger thing that nobody ever talks about is the time suck and what I mean is like a vacuum where what happens is that you will have maybe four or five classes usually five classes and there’s an expectation that you’re gonna have okay I’ve got this much time in the day I’m going to divide those classes by five and I’ll spend X number of hours on it only to find that sometimes pharmacology and pathophysiology are taking twice as much time as the other classes and that you didn’t really budget for that amount of time with your family with your work and all those things. And so what taking pharmacology ahead of time or if you could find a patho course, those are a lot harder to find. If you took a pharmacology class ahead of time, what it does is it frees up that extra time and instead of you being the one that’s kind of falling behind in all your classes, you’re actually ahead in Pharmacology. Actually, it becomes your superpower. So this sounds strange but imagine instead of going into the NCLEX dreading the 16 that you can have in Pharmacology and the other way around, you’re like oh cool a pharmacology question I know these and that you’re already 16 into the exam and that you’ve you’re like okay well I know I can get this 16 no problem so it really can be that way because what happens is if you’re ahead then you’re able to help the other students when you’ve helped the other students you go from what is an absorption rate of around 10 to 15 percent with lecture to about 90 when you’re teaching someone else how to do it. So the big thing I should call it like the online jumpstart pharmacology class but that might just get too weird but I think that um well I know for sure that those students that have either read the book gone into the courses and taken pharmacology after they’ve already had pharmacology are moving about 11 points so if they were going to get a 77 they would get like an 88 or something like that so about 11 points is what would have been a little bit different when you talk about uh taking that course so again if you’ve got questions you know where to get me but I just wanted to kind of put this in there before I get on to the next clinical topic uh again you know I’m sorry if you failed path though and failing farm and patho is just brutal but really it’s did you take pharmacology before pharmacology in some way and if you’ve taken a little bit of time to learn the language you’re not going to get behind you’re going to get ahead and you’re going to have opportunities to help others thanks for listening to the memorizing pharmacology podcast. You can find episodes cheat sheets and more at memorizingfarm.com. 

 

Again, you can sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile. Thanks again for listening.

Like to learn more?

Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to my YouTube Channel TonyPharmD here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses:  residency.teachable.com

 

 

How to Pass Chemistry on the First Try

Find the book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to TonyPharmD YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

In this episode, I interview Dr. Richard Roberts, a chemistry professor at Des Moines Area Community College, who gives some great advice on succeeding in chemistry. If you are interested in taking an online chemistry or pharmacology class, here's the link  https://www.dmacc.edu/programs/pdp/pre-pharmacy/Pages/online-pharmacology-class.aspx 

 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, a pharmacist and author of the Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in Pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly, self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/P/mobile.

Let’s get started with the show. Before we get started with the show, I just wanted to talk to you quickly about online courses. At Des Moines Area Community College (dmacc.edu), we have both Chemistry 122, which is IntroChem, and Pharmacology PHR185 available online. We’re going to talk about some tips to get through a chemistry class but honestly, you know, I’ve been teaching this for 15 years now. Most of the time when someone doesn’t do well, it’s not because of their ability.

It’s because of life getting in the way and it’s having so many responsibilities all at once including getting to a certain place at a certain time. Sometimes the online option, which to be fair actually requires I think a bit more autonomy than sometimes the in-person where you’re told you know it’s this day and all of that stuff. I think that it is a really good option for some people who have things in the way. So we’ll talk about how to succeed in chemistry class and to some extent pharmacology.

Do check out the online pharmacology course which is half full. It really fills up once semester’s over and students realize there is no summer class for them to make that class up at other colleges. Then the chemistry class, you can get on the waitlist or enrollment for fall starts here in a couple of days so dmacc.edu if you want to check those out or if you have questions just email me at Tonythepharmacist@gmail.com.

Again, the whole point of all of this is to help you succeed on your journey to becoming a health professional and not letting pharmacology and chemistry get in the way but instead allowing those two courses to be the ones that are foundational to helping you succeed.

Alright, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. Today I have Dr. Richard Roberts who teaches chemistry at the local community college and what I wanted to do is I wanted to ask him a bunch of questions about chemistry and getting good at chemistry that can really help us in Pharmacology.

So Dr. Roberts, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. “Thank you Tony, glad to be here.”

Okay so the first thing is when we talk about chemistry there’s a Stanford study that showed that the one class that knocks out more pre-meds and science students as they move through STEM and things like that is chemistry but the data actually show that it’s not that the class is hard it’s that students’ perceptions of themselves is a little bit low in terms of their abilities.

What are some of the things you’ve been able to do in your career to help students kind of increase their chemistry confidence? “I think a lot of it is about spending less time actually teaching and more time actually with the practice portion of the student experience. I know that I try to avoid lecture as much as possible and when I do lecture I try to keep it down to five to ten maybe 15 minutes at a time because I think it’s better for students to actually have an opportunity to struggle with the material rather than watch me do the material for them.”

“I kid them that I am sometimes like the Bob Ross of chemistry so you know I can watch five programs of Bob Ross painting landscapes and after that experience buy myself a bunch of paints but it never really turns out so I think it’s all a matter of practice. I’m sure that Bob probably practiced his craft for a number of years before he got so good at it.”

“Yeah and he had a certain voice with that and he would kind of whisper into it as if he’s talking to a single person and that’s how you know you’re supposed to address them.”

“Yeah, I play parts of your videos but when you actually add up the minutes that I use never more than a minute or two at a time.”

“So when a student comes sometimes math is something that’s a real struggle for them even though maybe they just they just pass statistics with a C or a B. One of the things that students can do to really improve their math, because we don’t mean it to be this way, but chemistry can be a math class in disguise sometimes. I guess that’s kind of unfortunate. I know that I always say that you know math is kind of the language and glue of most of the sciences in one way or another. I know that even biology, when you really get down to it, has a fair amount of math. And it comes down to practice. I always enjoy talking with students who tell me that they’re not good at math. I always tack on ‘yet’. It’s one of these things like my kids will, you know, when they’ve taken various music lessons, they want to quit because they’re not good at piano. And I always say ‘well, yet’. And I’m sure that everybody that took up the study of piano probably reached that same point in their study where they felt like they were never going to be good at it. And it just, you know, different people are going to take a different amount of practice to develop that skill.

Okay, well something that happened with the pandemic is the kind of move to some online classes, classes that traditionally were not even allowed to… Well, let me back up and say that sometimes programs like nursing and medicine would not accept the chemistry class that was taught online. But now with the pandemic, that may have changed for some. And I know that many of our students, our average student is a single parent with two children who’s about 27 or 28 years old. Online is a boon for them to not have to come in, to get that child care and those types of things. Tell me a little bit about how you’ve adapted the online to chemistry because that’s really hard to do.

Well, I think one of the biggest hang-ups that schools have had is about the lab portion of the class. So if there was accepting institutions, I know that our local big regent institutions had some pushback probably 10 or 12 years ago about the possibility of online classes and their biggest hang up was that students weren’t getting the experience with the hands-on portion. During the pandemic we kind of lucked out and a couple of our instructors had been teaching online for some time and we were able to kind of piggyback on that. They were using kits from one of the commercial sources and I don’t know whether I can mention a name. I’ll skip mentioning the name but there are several commercial lab producers out there and that kind of kept us afloat. And ever since then we’ve kind of maintained a few sections of these just for those students. And I know that in kind of my online conversations with students getting to know them, a lot of them are just as you described. They’re single parents, they might even be parents with a partner but nonetheless if they have small children that kind of limits their ability to travel. It’s like do I go to school and then not only am I paying a couple hundred dollars a credit for the class but I’m also spending several hundred dollars a week for daycare. We also get students that live in remote locations, rural locations that may not have the opportunity to travel to a nearby college. So it does expand the opportunities for students.

Yeah, I actually had the chance to take the kits on the molecular kids and I just thought okay well I’ll just go to their houses thinking you know just be in the area and I found that it was actually a half a day that I took to send out these. I think it was maybe 14 kits where I was going and turning off the paved road was not an uncommon thing but it was really neat to meet them.

Well, I guess one of the biggest things that students are worried about is their grades and it’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy if they do poorly on the first exam all of a sudden they’re like ‘see, I told you, I told you I wasn’t good at chemistry’. What are some of the ways that students can work on that confidence and say that it’s not that you are bad at chemistry, you had a bad exam?

Here is my attempt to correct the text:

"That’s feedback that your preparation might need to change in some way. What are the things you can do after test one? Because test one is a point, it’s not a trend, right? How can we make sure that that trend trends up?

Well, I’m glad you kind of mentioned that it isn’t just all bad. I usually have an exercise after that where I kind of call it a triage experience where I have them identify things that they were good at on that test. Because they obviously, if they’ve been studying at all, they probably were able to gain some skills in some areas. It’s not a complete loss. What were the things that you did the worst at? How can you kind of recover that material? Because chemistry is one of these classes that kind of builds. It’s like a big snowball and if you miss out on some of these early concepts, it’s going to hurt you in the long run. So how can we recuperate that? Are there any barriers that they had in their preparation? Sometimes they’ll admit that they worked too much in the weeks preceding a test. How can you change things so that you can afford yourself more time and more ability to prepare for the next test? So I kind of put a little bit of the ball in their court to get them to realize that they have the ability to change things, to give themselves a better opportunity for success later. And I also try to be intrusive with my communication. So sometimes if I notice that they’re not getting assignments completed on time, I start emailing them. And pretty soon, just like my children, if I pester them enough, they just get tired of me asking them to unload the dishwasher.

So we had something due for sixth grade math. There’s a test today and I was with the girls this morning and I was like okay, well what I want you to do is I just want you to write the questions on paper and then answer the quiz. And they feel okay if all three have to do it but if there’s any exclusion they don’t.

So let’s kind of finish up with the one I’ve asked you a bunch of questions. What would be the one thing that maybe you’ve learned in all these years that is absolutely essential for succeeding in chemistry or even in life? But what is that kind of like this: if you do this one thing, everything becomes a lot easier?

I think a lot of it comes down to just positive attitude and allowing yourself to invest in what you’re actually studying. I know that I took a lot of classes that I considered obstacles, like art appreciation or something like that. But in the long run, I always tried to look for the hidden gem in all of these things. And I always tell students that there’s probably bound to be something that they enjoy about the class. It may not be the content, it may be the students that they’re surrounded with, their neighbors, or maybe they enjoy me telling dad jokes every day or things like that.

I’m sorry, dad jokes? Back when we were young we just called them jokes but apparently as they age they become dad jokes.

So trying to make the experience as inviting and as fun for the students as I possibly can. Kind of letting them know that there is an opportunity to make small mistakes along the way and it’s all right. Everything will turn out all right. And not to dwell on something that didn’t go well for you because the chances are that if you have a positive attitude and actually invest in what you’re doing, you’re probably going to have more successes than failures along the way.

So trying to keep everybody thinking positively as they can.

There’s got to be a dad joke in there. So keep your eye on the proton or something like that.

Look at the protons, not the electrons. You know, and I think I lost an electron. Are you sure? I’m positive.

All those things, yeah.

So okay, well thanks so much for being on the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast.

Thank you Tony. Thanks for listening to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. You can find episodes, cheat sheets and more at memorizingpharm.com. Again, you can sign up for the email list at memorizingpharm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/p/mobile. Thanks again for listening.

 

Like to learn more?

Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to my YouTube Channel TonyPharmD here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

 

How Much Pharmacology is on the NGN NCLEX

Find the book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to TonyPharmD YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Beginner Book Link: https://www.audible.com/pd/Memorizing-Pharmacology-Audiobook/B09JVBHRXK?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-281667&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_281667_rh_us

Advanced Book Link: https://www.audible.com/pd/Memorizing-Pharmacology-Mnemonics-Audiobook/B07DLGC8MP?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-118296&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_118296_rh_us

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

The new NGN NCLEX is going to test your vocabulary and reading comprehension, and the first step is to understand how much pharmacology is on there and what to do about it. 

 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, pharmacist and author of The Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in Pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/P/mobile. Let’s get started with the show.

Hey, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I just want to talk briefly about the Next Generation NCLEX. The new exam is out April 1st and uh we’ll talk a little bit about how much pharmacology is on there but I think that the most valuable thing you can do is make sure you understand the question and you’re going to have a lot more reading on this with the six three case studies uh six questions each and when you start looking at the case studies what you’re going to find is there’s going to be terms that you know really well, there’s terms there that you don’t know at all and there’s terms that you think you know.

And I think the most valuable thing you can do is to have a running list of all the terms as you’re going through your practice questions that you don’t really remember or don’t really understand and then go back to memorizing them. So I get it, the NCLEX is supposed to be about understanding the scenario and all these things but if you don’t know what certain terms are then you’re in trouble.

So what’s going to come into play here and uh you know I hate to bring you back to English class but you know if you have something like the word diaphoresis that’s sweating but diaphoretic is someone who has sweated in the adjectival form is an adjective and so on and you may not necessarily, you might know like the word in one way but maybe not know it in another. And I think that one of the real ways to get an advantage is to improve your reading comprehension of the words that are in there.

So maybe you take a practice exam and when you go back through the practice exam I think one of the keys is to make sure that you understand all the terms and anytime you come into a condition or something you really don’t know, you’re going to want to take the time to really slow down and make sure that you memorize or remember that word.

So this is the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast so we’ll focus on that part of it but I just went to nclex.com and how to prepare and they’ve got a big sample pack of questions and an exam preview and there’s almost 150 questions in there so a really good preparation in terms of number of questions to understand what’s going on but you have to go to the candidate test plan to see what percentage is going to be pharmacology.

And so we go down through the test plan. I would have showed you questions but it’s copyrighted and they made clear that they don’t want that being shown in that way but if you look at pharmacological and parenteral therapies, you’re looking at 13 to 19 percent okay. So if you see 13 to 19 percent and you have between 85 and 150 questions, quick back of the napkin math means that you could have as few as 11 questions if you were done with 85 again that 13 percent or if you finished at 85, you could have answered 16 uh questions but it can go all the way up to almost 29 pharmacology questions which represents almost 20 percent of the exam.

So when I’m looking at this and I’m saying all right well how would I want my students to prepare for something like this it really comes down to reading comprehension and making sure that I know every single word on there. And the big words, that problem with pharmacology questions is that if you don’t know what the drug is for then you really can’t answer the question. And that’s unlike where okay I’ve got this case, I see all these things happening all these pieces put together, I think I can kind of make a reasonable assessment of what’s going on but if you have a straight line, what’s going to be an adverse effect you need to watch out for with blank, and you’re like, I don’t know what blank is. Well, it’s extremely difficult to get that one right. So when I think about something like that, I’m always treating it like a language. Like I’m trying to learn this new language and you learn medical terminology and then you kind of took that into anatomy and physiology and then into pathophysiology and then through your nursing clinicals, then you are now applying all of that.

But with pharmacology, the words don’t really conform to traditional English in their pronunciation. And when you need to figure like, oh gosh, what’s this one for? They don’t give you a list of well here are the drugs you need to know. There is no such list. So what we have to do is go and use okay what are the most commonly used medications. And so that’s where memorizing pharmacology, that original book that everyone still loves, I think.

Most of James Gillies, I mean he’s Scottish but it’s a British narrator basically where that really he introduces you. So that’s the first baby step, just listen to it and understand okay I get how to start picking up the language as I’m going to and from clinicals or to and from college. Because what you want to do is you want to kind of hear it and then all of a sudden your reticular activator is going to be open. So just as maybe you bought a blue car and all of a sudden you see blue cars everywhere.

Same thing, once you start hearing these terms all of a sudden you’re gonna start hearing people say them and then they’re gonna really stick. So it’s not about trying to get okay I’ve got to get a thousand questions done and so forth. It’s about taking the time to go back and say okay what words did I not understand or there’s some medication names in there that I really needed to know whether it’s some pathophysiologic terms that I didn’t know was there some different form of a verb or some form of a word that was in its adjectival or adverbial form that made it more difficult for me.

Okay let’s go back to the roots and this exam is very much a reading exam so if you struggle or haven’t really been challenged to read out loud then now is the time to start. And where you see yourself starting to stumble that’s really where you’re gonna want to start working through these words.

Although it’s a British narrator, I directed his pronunciation to be the American pronunciations even with something as simple as beta blocker which in the UK would be beta blocker. We use albuterol they use salbutamol and so everything in here is the United States versions but the key is to get that vocabulary down.

So once you start understanding the vocabulary that you’re looking for, you’re having these conversations with others or even getting ready to make sure that you succeed in your pharmacology class because I’ve said over and over again, you have to really take in Pharmacology to do really well in Pharmacology. That may seem counter-intuitive but it’s what I found.

Then you’re ready to start really working with the bigger mnemonics and those bigger mnemonics are the memorizing pharmacology mnemonics. And I’ve shared a bunch of them on the podcast but what you really now need to do is say okay now that I understand what the word is I need to know where it fits in.

And so now you’re talking about okay how do I remember a dihydropyridine versus a non-dihydropyridine calcium channel blocker? Okay which one was the one that affects the heart and the vessels which one just affects the vessels? Okay I’ve got an alpha Agonist versus an alpha antagonist okay which one’s going to open up the vessels which one’s going to close up the vessels which one’s going to cause fainting?

You know I’ve got a beta blocker, what’s it going to do? So beta, the B always goes with bradycardia kind of pushes it down okay why would I use a beta Agonist? Okay well now I’m going to open up the lungs and all of these different pieces that come with it that goes into the memorizing pharmacology mnemonic.

So first it’s just like grade school, you first learn the words and then you learn the words relation to each other. And I think the biggest challenge that’s going to happen with this NCLEX ngn and again my undergraduate degree is in English although my doctoral Pharmacy.

I really know that when you create case studies that everybody has to take and there are three case studies, six questions each. The reading comprehension, how quickly you can read, how quickly you can understand what’s going on and separate the pieces so that you don’t get lost in the forest for the trees as it were. I think that’s really what’s going to be the thing that separates those that pass with just the 85 questions and those that are really struggling to the 150 or maybe even failing.

So you know, it’s like well, when would I have time to read? Well, I’m not asking you to read for pleasure. I’m just saying that when you do your practice tests and you have your practice questions rather than just say okay these are the ones I got right and these were the ones I got wrong. I would go through all the questions and go through okay these were the words I didn’t understand even in the ones that you got right because there’s one in four chance a lot of times that you got it right but you didn’t know.

That you maybe didn’t know it because it’s really going to be a reading comprehension exam and as fair or unfair as that is, that’s what the decision has been to do this now. Yeah, it would have maybe made more sense in this kind of digitally technological world that we could have somebody actually creating these kind of scenarios where you’re actually listening to it and here’s what’s happening this is what you see what do you do and I’m sure it will get there eventually.

But right now, the NGN is really the Next Generation NCLEX is really, I think a reading exam and the best way to improve your reading is to write down the word that you didn’t know. Use the mnemonics that I’ve given you in the podcast and the books and all those things to find a way to remember them because there are some things that it just gets so. The word I want to use is it gets the terminology kind of overpowers it and you’re just like oh my gosh what is going on here what are all.

How am I not familiar with these words and it’s not that you weren’t familiar with them, it’s that you’ve never read them. You’ve only heard them or maybe you’ve glanced at them or seen them. So I think that as you kind of continue on, I think you’re gonna have to become much more conversational and much more fluent in reading as you’re kind of moving toward the NCLEX and so forth.

So one way to get that good feeling and to make sure that you know what the question is saying is to get better at reading and you get better at reading by doing the vocab words. So anyway, if you got questions for me, Tony the pharmacist at gmail.com again if you’ve never had an audiobook on Audible before memorizing pharmacology whether it’s the first or second edition or memorizing pharmacology mnemonics if you’re kind of getting toward okay well how do I put all of this together.

I think that either of those can be really helpful on making sure you understand the question so that you can answer it well. Thanks for listening to the memorizing pharmacology podcast. You can find episodes, cheat sheets, and more at memorizingfarm.com again. You can sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile. Thanks again for listening. Thank you.

 

Like to learn more?

Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

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Antiarrhythmics Pharmacology Mnemonics

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Antiarrhythmics are usually more of a "can you figure out which class this drug is in" and I give you a number of mnemonics to put the right drug in the right place. 

 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, pharmacist and author of the Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in Pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingpharm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/P/mobile. Let’s get started with the show.

Alright, we’re going to go into antiarrhythmics or antidysrhythmics is really more correct pharmacology mnemonics and the first step is really to see where these are. You’re going to hear class one usually with Roman numerals rather than these kind of numbers but class 1 sodium channel blockers. Class 2 is the beta blocker, class 3 are potassium channel blockers, class 4 calcium channel blockers and class 5 are kind of the unknown or extras. Beta blockers and calcium channel blockers may be familiar from hypertension drugs but these other ones might be a little bit new.

So there’s Vaughn Williams which is how we kind of classify these and usually your questions are going to be in some way you have to know what the sodium channel blockers are or which ones are potassium channel blockers. So we’re going to do a couple of mnemonics to just kind of get you knowing what’s what and then we’ll go from there.

So, I made up a little story: NAB money in Kansas City, police are mad. A way to remember that number one is NA which is it’s actually for natrium but it’s sodium so sodium channel blockers and then the B in NAB and you can put two B’s here to make it more clear that it’s going to be beta blockers. And then Kansas City represents three and four which are going to be potassium which is calcium or calium that’s the K and then CA are the calcium from calcium channel blockers so NAB KC and then mad. The others that are kind of in this fifth group are magnesium, adenosine, and digoxin.

That’s kind of one way to do it. Another way is to maybe make a sentence like some block Kings and castles with mad moves. So the sum is for sodium okay and that would be NA plus block would be for beta blockers. K would be for potassium and kings CA from castles would be calcium channel blockers and then mad moves. The Mad represents the Magnesium, adenosine, and digoxin.

I’ve got a little picture here of a king and a Castle in chess okay so two different ways to remember those but some students have to remember like all of them like a lot of the drugs within the classes so the class ones actually divided up into class one A, one B, and one C.

Traditional way to remember this is Double Quarter Pounder with lettuce tomato mayo and more fries please so class 1A is disopyramide, quinidine, procainamide that’s the Double Quarter Pounder. The lettuce tomato Mayo is class 1B lidocaine, mexiletine, tocainide and then class 1C more fries please is moricizine, flecainide, propafenone.

So if you have to remember all of those then hopefully this is helpful and then we kind of add the other ones so a beta blocker. The nice thing is that the endings are the same so it’s like bisoprolol, atenolol, metoprolol ending with the OLOL. I just put the three Bam Bam for bisoprolol atenolol metoprolol you can think of Class 2 because they are they are you know have two B’s in beta blocker to remind you that’s class two.

Class three is potassium blockers: The sad poets so sad is for sotalol amiodarone dofetilide and The Poets is for potassium to remember that one, class four is the calcium channel blockers with four very dill pickles. So it’s class four and the Very Dill stands for verapamil and diltiazem. Okay, and then the class five, the Mad group is magnesium, adenosine, and digoxin. So if you have to remember all of them, this is a way to do it. So we can do a little quiz here, make sure that you’ve got this down. So on the left I have sodium, beta blockers, potassium, calcium channel blockers, and then the unknown. And then adenosine, procainamide, metoprolol, diltiazem and amiodarone are not in the right order.

So how do we get the right order? Well we think about our mnemonics here and our sodium again it’s going to be that Double Quarter Pounder so the P from procainamide. The beta blockers end in OLOL so that’s group two and again two B’s to remind you it’s group two. The potassium is going to be that sad poet and the A in sad poet is amiodarone. Then our four very dill pickles are the diltiazem and the verapamil that’s four. And then the Mad group is adenosine so that magnesium adenosine digoxin that’s in our fifth group.

And so it would look like this if the answers are correct. Okay so let’s just take a look at some of the characteristics of some of these. So for example if you’ve got group 1A procainamide this is the P in the Double Quarter Pounder it’s good for atrial fib supraventricular tachycardia vtac it’s really chemical cardioversion our mechanism is sodium and hypotension is really the big one here can cause a wide QRS but if we have hypotension as an adverse effect we probably don’t want to give it to a hypotensive patient then congestive heart failure second third degree heart block all of these would be contraindications.

And then what are we going to do? Well we’ll make sure to watch their labs and then an ECG would also be important as well so that’s procainamide. Get to amiodarone now we’re talking about ventricular fibrillation rather than atrial fibrillation resistant v-tac you can give it for atrial and ventricular dysrhythmias but that’s probably where you would put it potassium is our mechanism again this is group three we kind of skipped over the beta blockers.

And there’s a number of things that you’re going to have with adverse effects you really want to tell the patient about first the hypotension so just get that blood pressure just kind of dropping blue facial hue I couldn’t use the Blue Man Group because those guys are actually a thing so I just found this picture of and I thought it was clever that they’re kind of pacing and waiting in line and they’ve got blue faces and well blue bodies too and then vision changes.

So while it’s kind of tough to say well what does vision change look like having this rainbow iris just kind of reminds you that vision changes so hypotension blue facial hue and vision changes bradycardia and shock are really contraindications for this one. And then what do we want to monitor? We want to make sure to put cardiac monitor on and modified valsalva maneuver has just proven to be a bit better.

And then the Valsalva if you aren’t familiar with it it’s where you kind of plug your nose to pop your ears alright so again this is informational purposes only it’s not medical advice if you have a medical condition contact a medical professional.

Thanks for listening to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. You can find episodes cheat sheets and more at memorizingpharm.com. Again you can sign up for the email list at memorizingpharm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com/P/mobile. Thanks again for listening.

 

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Beta Agonists Mnemonic IMACH Isoproterenol Albuterol Salmeterol Terbutaline

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Auto Generated Transcript:

Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, pharmacist and author of the Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in Pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile-friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.

Com forward slash P forward slash moving. Let’s get started with the show. Hey, welcome to Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra. I wanted to give you with the beta agonists a more general way to look at drugs and remember what you’re supposed to know about them and I’m going to use a mnemonic eye match but it’s actually i-m-a-c-h and I’ll explain what I’m talking about here. So the way that I do this or kind of put drugs in my head to make it simple and create a story and I know many of you are like why am I taking English 1 and

English 2 or comp one and comp2 to become a health professional and as an undergraduate English major although I’ve got my you know doctorate in healthcare and pharmacy my background in English reminds me that you know to remember something you really got to get the story together and the story comes from I am a considerate health professional so that’s my I match mnemonic uh I couldn’t get the T in there but what we’re trying to do is really say you know for indications mechanism of action which many people

Overdue like you can say you know Methotrexate is going to affect certain enzyme but you can just say it’s an anti-metabolite. I don’t have to get too into it or something is cholinergic or anticholinergic that’s the mechanism of action and some of you call that drug class so however you want to do that but we start with indication mechanism of action adverse effects then some people call this contraindications really I think of it as considerations like if the patient is this then we don’t want to give this but in this

Exception we might so it’s more of a consideration but many times we’ll call this a contraindication and we’re really being empathetic to what it is that their other conditions are and then health professionals so I am a considerate health professional and the H is really just as a health professional what do I need to do to help the patient and that depends on what you do. I mean are you a pharmacist physician nurse physician assistant you know what what are you what are you and what is your role in helping the

Patient so indication mechanism of action adverse effects consideration slash contraindications and then how can we help the patient better take the medicine and I’ll show you how this works with the beta Agonist that we have in this group okay so let’s just start with I always like to just do one slide like what’s it for so indications when you have something like isoproterinol which is isopril inotrope is in the word and I’ll show you how to do that but this is something that’s you know for

Shock or you know bradycardia those types of things Albuterol and we can underline the stem the tyrol stem let’s just know it’s a beta2 Agonist which is pro air brand name tells you what it’s for it’s a rescue inhaler so it provides air by you know bronchodilating salmeterol some people call it salmeterol. I like that the word meter is in there because it’s a metered dose inhaler but that’s also a terol and so we had this problem with the beta blockers where wait a minute you’ve got Albuterol and

Salmeterol and they’re they do the same thing but they’re different why are they different well albuterol is short acting some meteorol is long-acting and I’ll talk a little bit about that mechanism of action in a minute but usually so meteorol has to be added to fluticasone there was a study that showed that salmeterol alone was no bueno so fluticasone has that sewn ending for a steroid and then we add these together to get error so that’s what Advair is but this is that what patients would call a controller inhaler

Something they have to take every day sometimes twice a day those types of things and then terbutylene or breaking now that’s a subcutaneous there’s some other dosage forms but that’s even more short acting than albuterol but these are the indications that’s what it’s for but how do we remember all this okay well the mechanism of action can be really helpful if you know what to look for so isoproterinol or icprow this is that beta1 beta 2 agonists so it’s going to affect the heart and the lungs you’ve heard that mnemonic where you have two lungs so beta two one heart beta one albuterol that’s Pro air is just going to be beta 2 and we’ll talk a little bit how that isn’t always the case so beta 2 if it’s used properly but many uh patient cannot afford Advair or doesn’t take Advair on a regular basis their controller inhaler they need more and more Albuterol they keep complaining they’re well I’m so jittery and just you know got Tremors and all these things that’s from coming and using albuterol

Wrong you’re not using it as a rescue inhaler you’re trying to use it as a controller inhaler that’s not what it’s meant for uh some meat roll with fluticasone is Advair so we have a beta 2 Agonist to open up the lungs for a long time and a steroid and so the steroid is to help with inflammation the two components of asthma are that bronchospasm and inflammation and then terbutaline that’s beta2 okay so this mechanism of action you’re going to see these terms so I just want to make them clear short acting selective

Beta 2 Agonist is a mouthful so we just call it a Saba Saba that’s Albuterol and terbutylene and then a long-acting selective beta2 Agonist is a laba which is cell meteorol not the fluticasone it just happens to be in there all right so let’s start with isoproterinol and the kind of the mnemonic here so if you take the word isoproterinol and you get rid of the so the ER and the L you actually have all the letters for inotrope and that’s what it does so if you don’t remember what an inotrope is it increases the force of

Contraction of the heart it’s also a chronotrope which increases heart rate but again inotrope is really when we’re talking about what it does that’s what it’s going to be so if we use our eye match mnemonic here and I get it you you probably get big lists of all these things like well it’s not that I don’t get what the adverse effect is is I don’t get which of the 10 adverse effects are in there or which of the 10 contraindications are in there and what I like to do is just say well let me

Just start with the ones that I understand based on the mechanism of action so I can make a story okay so I put the different types of shock in here we’re not going to go into that I mean you know you can you know obstructive distributive cardiogenic hypovolemic and then you can get into the three types of distributive with septic and anaphylactic and neurogenic shock that’s going way down the rabbit hole what we want to do is just say all right well what is shock well shock is a decrease in blood pressure you know

We’re going to have a decrease in cardiac output well what’s cardiac output made up of it you learn that cardiac output is heart rate type stroke volume well if we increase this heart rate we can increase the cardiac output we can increase the blood pressure which does the opposite of what shock is which is lowering it and then increasing heart rate obviously is the opposite of bradycardia so when we look at the indications of shock and bradycardia having an inotrope that’s going to increase heart rate increase blood

Pressure cardiac output it’s a good thing. The mechanism of action can affect beta 1 and beta 2. So we’re going to affect that heart, affect the lungs. Adverse effects, so when you’re thinking about beta 1 especially really think about the CNS and how it just really kind of makes you jittery increasing that heart rate. So if we’re increasing heart rate, what would be a contraindication or consideration? Well, if somebody’s got hypertension, we’re trying to lower their you know heart rate blood pressure All that probably not the best medication for that and then in terms of how can we help the patient well when we get to you know you can kind of go in the weeds with shock but and losing that systemic vascular resistance but the big thing is that you know we we need to have that volume uh to make this all work so we want to definitely avoid dehydration okay okay with the albuterol um again this is for asthma COPD but this is the rescue inhaler so this is that short acting bronchodilating agent so it’s beta2 it opens up the two lungs

And then again the CNS adverse effects you’re like well wasn’t that beta one well you can lose selectivity if you take this too much and that’s when we would kind of get that jitteriness the tremors and then you say well how can hypertension be it it’s beta 2 Agonist again if you lose selectivity then hypertension can be an issue then how can we help the patient well you know you want to open up the lungs before you take that next inhaler breath I know some people like to just squirt the inhaler a couple times right away get it

Done with but really let’s wait a minute between Puffs to to help open up those bronchi especially if we’re going to use it before the controller inhaler so better to open up the lungs so more controller inhaler gets to the lungs and then kind of a you know bfo blinding flash of the obvious if you’re using a beta Agonist you probably don’t want to have beta antagonists on board especially something like Propranolol which specifically goes after those beta-2s uh so salmeterol and fluticasone or Advair same thing it’s an asthma COPD

But the contrast is to that albuterol this is the controller inhaler the one that long acting beta 2 Agonist and the mechanism of action we’re opposing both sides of that asthma now with this controller inhaler the beta 2 Agonist open up the lungs deal with that bronchospasm and then the steroid for the as an anti-inflammatory okay got the little muscled lungs here as an image and then CNS when you lose selectivity again you get that kind of jitteriness that comes along with it but when we think about a steroid one of the things

That it does and we use it for is an immunosuppressant but if your immunosuppressing locally like in the mouth you’re gonna get thrush so that’s why the washing the mouth out with water you know after each use makes so much sense and then pneumonia because again we’re immunosuppressing a little bit here hypertension so again that beta one you know if we lose that selectivity and diabetics you know that especially with when you add some kind of steroid you’re going to get that hyperglycemia because you know when

Your body needs is when your body feels steroid it’s like okay well something’s gonna happen I’m going to need sugar for whatever events happening so it makes you hyperglycemic but obviously if you’re a diabetic that’s an issue and so again we’ve got that beta antagonist we want to watch out for and here we want to wash out the mouth with water and not swallow but expectorate and get that out of our mouth so we don’t get the thrush okay terbutylene don’t really see this as much but this again bronchosmith

Bronchospasm and asthma exacerbation it’s a beta-2 Agonist it’s even shorter acting than albuterol it’s like super short acting and you know we can again get those CNS effects when you lose selectivity but there is a laundry list of adverse effects that can come along with terbutylene uh and then hypertension again we want to watch out for that and diabetic so it’s kind of the same as the other ones and of course we want to watch out for beta antagonists but I put a little image here of subcutaneous versus IM injection Although they did bring I am back during covid to avoid using a nebulizer um but really Sub-Q is where you go with tributaline as always uh disclaimer the information is provided for informational purposes only not intended to provide should not be relied for medical or other advice I urge readers to consult with a medical professional if you have a medical condition foreign thanks for listening to the memorizing pharmacology podcast you can find episodes cheat sheets and more at memorizingfarm.com again you can sign up

For the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile thanks again for listening.

 

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Pharmacology Antiarrhythmics Mnemonic

In this video, we go over a mnemonic to help you remember the five Vaugh-Williams classifications of antiarrhythmic medications. 

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In this chapter, we begin our dive into Cardiac System pharmacology. You can find all the respiratory episodes here at https://www.memorizingpharm.com/oer6  

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Auto Generated Transcript:

Welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology Podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, pharmacist and author of the Memorizing Pharmacology book series, bringing you mnemonics, cases, and advice for succeeding in Pharmacology. Sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile. Let’s get started with the show.

Hey, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology Podcast. I’m excited to talk to you a little bit about the cardiac section. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to do an interactive activity with the antiarrhythmics and I think it gets a little bit confusing when we talk about them but we have class one which is the n a or sodium blockers and then we have well fast sodium channel blockers we have within that one a one B one C so procainamide uh lidocaine and phenytoin in one b and then flecanide in one C then we have the two which is the beta blockers but we can have you know the first gens which are like Propranolol second gen metoprolol and third gen Carvedilol uh we kind of moved down to class three which is amiodarone and then class four would be the Verapamil and deltaizum so the amiodarone is going to be a potassium blocking and then the calcium channel blockers are going to be the Verapamil and deltaism so one two three and four and then five we’ll talk a little bit about adenosine uh in a second here.

Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to go over the antiarrhythmic agents or sometimes called the anti-disrhythmic agents and what we’re going to do is we’re going to just do a little matching here but what I want to give you is a bit of a mnemonic that can help you remember which class goes with which medication and the mnemonic is Nab K C A so NAB for sodium and a and the B for beta blocker and it may help if you do NAB and ABB that may help you even more and then k for potassium blocker or potassium channel blocker really and then C A for calcium channel blocker and then the last one is adenosine for five so this comes from the Vaughn Williams classification.

And you’ll be told about the Roman numerals from a numeral one which looks like an i which is class one uh class two is two eyes class three is three eyes class four is an i with a V and class five is a v by itself so what we’re going to be going over and I’m not going to answer these in the order that they’re in I’m going to go class 1 Class 2 class 3 class 4 and then adenosine class five because what I want for you to do is to remember it using this mnemonic so class one what we’re looking for is the word sodium or n a in one of the answers.

So here are the answer choices. And I know they’re a little bit long but I just want to read them so that you can hear how kind of jumbled it is when you just try to read them without having any mnemonic or anything uh first one is medications prolonged repolarization by blocking the potassium channels in cardiac cells that are responsible for repolarization number two says anti-disrhythmic medications slow conduction and prolonged depolarization by decreasing sodium influx into cardiac cells medications increase the refractory period of the AV node by slowing the influx Flux Of calcium ions thus decreasing the ventricular response and decreasing the heart rate medications are beta blockers that are used to decrease conduction velocity automaticity and the refractory period of the cardiac conduction cycle.

And then a unique medication given to patients who are experiencing paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia okay so our keywords were potassium sodium calcium beta blocker and then medication so now let’s use our mnemonic our NAB K C A so the N A from NAB would be class one okay. And we saw that it was this answer anti-disrhythmic medication slow conduction and prolonged depolarization by decreasing sodium influx into cardiac cell so one is na in NAB class one Class 2 are beta blockers two B’s okay so n a b b medications are beta blockers that are used to decrease conduction velocity automaticity.

And refractory period of cardiac conduction cycle class three was K so again it’s NAB KCA so little bit tricky here because potassium when you look at periodic table it K calium it synonym potassium potassium comes from pot ash uh which where this comes from let’s put that class 3 there medications prolonged repolarization by blocking potassium channels in cardiac cells responsible repolarization class four medications okay we’re going match this increase refractory period AV node by slowing influx calcium ions RCA thus decreasing ventricular response decreasing heart rate but also use as class 5 which adenosine okay check okay see they’re all right.

So again going from one we have our sodium which was our n a from periodic table again that’s little bit tricky one also because it’s natrium but we don’t say that somebody is hyposodium emic we say that they are hyponatremic okay and then class two was our BB our beta blockers okay our class 3 was our k for calium which is potassium on periodic table class four was calcium RCA and then a for adenosine is our class 5 which really mechanism action kind question mark but so class one class two class three class four class five uh hopefully little bit easier way of remembering those uh from this cardiac module interactive activity.

Thanks for listening to the Memorizing Pharmacology Podcast. You can find episodes cheat sheets and more at memorizingfarm.com again. You can sign up for the email list at memorizingfarm.com to get your free suffixes cheat sheet or find our mobile friendly self-paced online pharmacology review course at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile. Thanks again for listening.

 

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Acid Reducer Drug Suffix TIDINE Pharmacology

In this video episode of the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast, I show you how to make your own first 20 elements Google doc so that you can readily memorize the rest of the table or have a head start on chemistry class.

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While chemistry is a foundation course usually given before pharmacology, we don't always connect the elements to the medications. 

In the second part, I will talk about medical uses for the first 20 elements so that you connect the chemistry of the Periodic Table of Elements to what you might be doing in your future career.  

 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Hey, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m going to take a little bit of a detour today from our mnemonics in the advanced mnemonics from pharmacology and gastrointestinal system. What we’re going to do is we’re going to go over the periodic table and go over the first 20 elements and how to make a Google doc that you can use and kind of keep. But what I want to do is show you how I make them and how you can create it from memory. So the first thing we’ll do is we’ll create a table here.

We’re going to go across one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and then we’re going to go down one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Okay so nine across and eight down. Okay all right uh we’re going to have to make the font seven uh that’s the only way that everything will fit so that we don’t have to have any letters and words kind of going around but that makes it a little bit easier. Let’s see if we can’t make this a little bit bigger to see on the screen so there we go.

All right so first thing we’re going to do we’re going to kind of put some things here on the side and I think the easiest thing to do is actually not fill these in yet so I can kind of explain them. What we’re going to do is we’re going to put four periods here so we’re going to put period 1 period 2 period 3 and period 4.

So the periodic table of elements is because the periods have some similarities though as we’ll learn groups which are up and down or vertical are actually tend to be more related and so when we look at group numbers we would just go put something like group number in there and I would go one two three four five six seven and eight and then we’re going to make a little bit of a change instead of 3 it’s 13 instead of 4 it’s 14.

Instead of 5 it’s 15, 6 is 16, 7 is 17, 8 is 18. The reason for this is that since we’re doing the first 20 elements and maybe I’ll just even make it more explicit that we’re doing the first 20 elements from memory. The kind of table leaf that you know during Thanksgiving you can put a little extra piece of a table into a dining room table to make it a little bit longer. You’re going to see those transition elements we’re not going to mess with those right now so that’s why the group numbers are 1, 2, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18.

And the way that I like to do it is to start with the abbrev start with the numbers okay and then we’ll go to the abbreviation which is a lot easier to remember letters than it is to remember names then we’ll talk about how some of the endings of the names are the same because of the Latin and then we’ll go into atomic math so how much each of them weighs and I’ll show you the first 20 elements trick which is something that a lot of people like to use okay so let’s start with just numbering everything and I think to make things

Easier or more familiar what we’ll do is we’ll use this center align okay so start there and let’s start with one and this is what’s a little bit goofy is that we’re going to put our 2 all the way here under group 18. So group 1 is a 1 group 18 is a two okay then we go 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19 and 20.

Okay so it’s a little bit goofy but I think it’s a little bit easier if you take a look at the numbers first before you ever mess with any abbreviations or any names of any elements. And so what we’ll do is to make it even more clear we’ll bold the group numbers and the periods so that it’s a lot easier for you to see okay so now let’s do the abbreviations so it’s H then He and we have Li Be and what I’ll do is I’ll show you a way to remember a bunch of these and what usually happens is you remember

Them but not necessarily the order and so sometimes it’s a little bit tougher to remember that order. And what we’ll do is we’ll see how some words kind of pop up as you’re looking at the periodic table. And Mg is 12 Al is13 Si is14 P for phosphorus is15 S for sulfur is16 Cl for chlorine is17 Ar for argon oops and then we come down to this last one K for potassium is19 Ca for calcium okay so what I’ll do is I’m going to put just a couple of notes here that we can use and we’ll put HH to

Remind ourselves that the first two elements of the periodic table start with an H hydrogen and helium. And then it is liberating to know all of the first 20 elements so Li for lithium Be for beryllium. You have to know your ABCs and in many ways the periodic table is like your ABCs and if you look at this box with aluminum boron carbon and silicon the first letters are ABCs. And what you usually see is some mnemonic that’s going to teach you the first 20 and you have to learn it in order but you don’t have to you can just say okay.

Here is the corrected version of your text:

"Well, here’s a little box and I see ABC’s. Okay, you also see the letters N-O for make the word no after boron and carbon for nitrogen and oxygen. Also see in I know this is not really grammatical but He Ne Ar okay. So looking at the elements in group 18 which we’ll learn later, the noble gases, but He Ne Ar and then I also think about I’m a runner, I like doing marathons. So someone who runs, you want to drink a lot of water before the race and make sure you’re peeing clear so peas clear C-L-A-R okay.

So just some ways to remember some of the elements abbreviations and where they are some other things that I just kind of notice is that N and M are right next to each other in the alphabet it’s just backward where the M is second and the N is first and then the K from K Liam which we’ll learn about in a second and K sound from calcium are right next to each other here too. So really when you’re learning the first 20 it’s not just about okay hydrogen and helium lithium beryllium boron carbon nitrogen oxygen

In a linear fashion but it’s also good to kind of keep it sticky in your head that all of these are where they belong okay okay so let’s move on to the names okay so what I want you to look at are some of the endings and you’re going to notice that when you see helium the next one lithium is very similar as is beryllium and then boron and carbon but we don’t say that we say carbon are similar as well nitrogen the oxygen and then the original hydrogen are all very similar oops add a little extra typing there with oxygen okay.

Fluorine is a halogen which we’ll learn about in a minute but also is going to match up with chlorine down below it and then neon we see that O-N ending again and what you’re going to figure out is there are just not a ton of different endings what we’re going to do with sodium is we’re going to put just under it natrium which is where the N A comes from that’s why it’s not so magnesium aluminum and in some countries you’ll still hear aluminium but we use aluminum in the states silicon.

And this is where it gets a little bit goofy where if you had pronounced it silicone it actually makes a different word so silicone includes silicon and some other things and some of the medical uses that you have for it phosphorus sulfur and then chlorine argon 18. We’ll just move this up a little bit and then for this potassium we’ll do potassium and callium and it as you get into your study especially if you become a healthcare professional when somebody is low on sodium we don’t say hyposodium emic we say.

Hydro hyponatremic if they have too much sodium we say hypernatremic and then with the potassium it’s the same thing we say hypokalemic too much too little potassium or hyperkalemic too much potassium so it’s important to know where that N A and K comes from because you’re going to be using it if you get into medical terminology okay so Ca for calcium and that’s all the goofiness there next thing you’re going to kind of do in the progression is you’re going to have to learn how much each of these weigh and we talk.

About mass rather than weight and you’re going to hear atomic masses so there’s a neat little trick to knowing it and this is the first 20 elements trick that any odd number which is going to be you know the numbers that we see right now are the atomic numbers or the number of protons in each of these elements so hydrogen has one proton which is a positively charged item in the middle or the nucleus of the atom so the odd is going to be double plus one okay and then the even is going to just be double and I’ll show you what this.

How this works out so hydrogen we see double plus one would be one times two is two plus one makes three okay two is even so we just double to make four lithium is odd so double plus one is seven so three times two is six plus one is seven beryllium is four so we make it eight boron is five so we make it eleven okay double plus one carbon twelve nitrogen 14 plus 115 oxygen double 16 fluorine 9 double plus 1 19 neon we’ll just go double 20.

 

Sodium we’re going to actually put this between the sodium and the natrium just so it’s really nice and even nice and clean. And so we’re going to see double plus one because it’s odd 23 magnesium we’re going to have double 24 aluminum double plus 127 silicon double 28 phosphorous 15 it’s going to be double plus 1 31 sulfur it’s going to be double 32 chlorine double plus 1 is going to be 34 plus 135 argon doubles 36 and then potassium we’ll again put it like right between there so we see double plus 1 is going to be 39 so 38 plus 1 and then calcium is going to be double 40. Now not all of those are exactly right there are four that need to be changed because they are exceptions and so the exceptions are and I just put H Ben Error okay so because it’s H B E N and A R those are the four that we’re going to make exceptions and those exceptions are going to be 1 9 14 and 40.

And you see the 1 9 1 4 4 0 and hopefully you can remember that so we recognize that hydrogen we change from a 3 to a 1 that’s actually its correct atomic mass beryllium we change from an 8 to a 9 that’s its correct atomic mass nitrogen goes from 15 to 14 and argon from 36 to 40. Okay so those are the exceptions then what you’re going to be asked to do is you’re going to ask to name four of the groups so group 1 group 2 group 17 and group 18.

The other groups do have names but we don’t really use them they’re a little bit goofy but if you put the word names in all caps here the name of the first group is AM and all the alkali metals the second group is going to be AEM alkali earth metals I’m going to talk a little bit about the metalloid stairs which is not a group as much as it is recognizing where we separate metals and nonmetals MS then we have the halogens and then the noble gases okay so we’ll put these up but I just put this here because if you look at names the word

Names AM AEM and MS are all part of that okay so let’s start with this first group name and what we can do is we can just kind of put this up here so group name and we’ll put alkali metals and then alkaline earth metals and we’re kind of losing everything so we may have to reduce to maybe 150 percent here so that we can see everything I’m going to put the metalloid stairs here because they’re going to start here but generally when you see a periodic table that’s colored in with some differences in the different colors

You’re going to see stairs with boron and silicon and then some of the other elements that are separating metals on the left from non-metals on the right then we go to halogens group 17 over here and then the noble gases are group 18. Okay all right then you’re going to talk about bonding there’s going to be Ionic and covalent bonding which you’ll talk about so we’ll start with Ionic charge and it’s going to be where are the plus is okay so the way to do this is to just go plus oops.

Plus one plus two plus three X then plus minus three minus two minus one X and so I’ll show you where that all works out and again our goal is more to just have this Google doc where we can always kind of go back to it so we’re looking at Ionic charge we see plus one plus two plus three X don’t really mess with that one minus three minus two minus one X and we see that you know hydrogen lithium sodium and potassium will have the plus one charge magnesium and calcium plus two aluminum plus three nitrogen phosphorus minus three

Oxygen sulfur minus two chlorine fluorine minus one. And just an easy way to remember those, maybe we’ll bold these sections, make it just a little bit stand out a little bit more hmm it made it go over let me get rid of that Ionic, put charge there okay next thing you’ll be asked to do is know the valence number. So valence numbers number of electrons in the outer shell, what we can do with that though is we can make it so I want to center this, I’m going to center align.

Okay, look at the ones place in the group number, valence of group one is one, valence of group two is two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So you can write your note here that valence electrons are in the ones place. Alright. So now let’s move on, built our periodic table what some people like to do is they like color it in with some different colors. And what I want do kind of make colors at least not too dramatic so that it’s still useful to you okay so let’s just start coloring this in and the way to do that on docs is to take the table options and properties and then you click down here on color and what we do is we change the cell background color so with hydrogen what I’m going to do is one of the big things is recognizing that hydrogen is a little bit goofy in that it’s going to be over here okay and it matches up to carbon nitrogen oxygen fluorine as well as phosphorus sulfur and chlorine okay and I made them two different yellows I didn’t mean to do that okay there we go alright.

And what we can do is we can kind of color this box up here above the carbon and we’ll just color that one in the same color and yeah that one’s a little bit different I think we’ll use this one okay there okay and we’ll recognize this as the reactive non-metals okay we’re going to start from left to right and so what we can do is we can do the alkali metals here so we’ll just color this in and maybe we’ll use kind of this kind of very light red so we can still read our what we’ve got there.

And let’s see if even a little bit lighter just to make it a little bit easier to read those okay there we go so those are the alkali metals and then the alkaline iron earth metals maybe we can do a little bit of a purple or lavender that’s gonna kind of match up with that there we go okay then we’ve got our metallite stairs and we can think of stairs being maybe we’ll put a kind of a light gray for these stairs okay alright and use that same one okay so boron and silicon these are metalloids or

Semi-metals they separate the metals from the nonmetals aluminum there’s something called a post-transition metal and maybe we’ll just kind of make it green to just make it stand out a little bit and we can kind of maybe put that one up here so just make the name post transition metal will be green okay and maybe what I can do is I can kind of move these around a little bit to make it so that they match up a little bit better with where they lie so here we go what I might do is take the metalloid reactive non-metals and I’ll take this

Label and I’ll move it over here where oxygen is and there we go okay and we’ll take this metalloid stairs and put it over silicon so that it’s actually over the section that it should be over and post transition metal then we can move over aluminum so it can be in the right place alright so we can now change the colors to make it all work out so it matches up and this guy should be clear alright okay so some people learn better with colors and sometimes that’s a little bit easier and then maybe the noble gases we’ll do

Orange something just a little bit distinct from that yellow over there okay there we go alright. And I won’t mess with the halogens although fluorine and chlorine are halogens I don’t want to make it reactive nonmetals and the halogens because it gets a little bit goofy here but what I want to do is just kind of show you in our next section how these are used in medicine. And many of these 20 are used either as elements or something else in medicine but we’re already at 20 minutes so I’m going to do that in part 2.

 

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Proton Pump Inhibitor Side Effects Mnemonic - DEVELOPER

In this episode we take on the proton pump inhibitor side effects

This is advanced pharmacology mnemonic #5 of 134 that we'll be going over, I'll usually do a brief introduction, play the mnemonic from the course, then we'll do a couple of quiz questions to make sure you got what I was throwing down.

Find the book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

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Auto Generated Transcript:

Alright, good morning and welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. We’re going to go through another mnemonic in just a second but I wanted to show you the breadcrumb trail of how to get there. So you go to memorizingfarm.com, online pharmacology classes and I’m going to the teachable pharmacology course which takes me to the self-paced pharmacology course with mobile quizzes and videos. Again, you can always get half off by using the code HALF-OFF all caps.

And what we’re going to do is we’re going to go down to so these are the basics pharmacology basics then we have our GI musculoskeletal respiratory immune neurocardioendocrine and over-the-counter and now we have over 150 videos with the advanced mnemonics and we’re going to go here to proton pump inhibitors and the Ulcer Developer side effects.

Which question five: Name seven possible side effects or interactions of proton pump inhibitors.

Number five: Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). We’ll use the mnemonic Ulcer Developer side effects: D - Diarrhea from Clostridium difficile infection, E - Elderly to remind us of dementia, V E - Enzymes SIP issues with some PPIs, L - Low magnesium, O - Osteopenia bone loss a concern for fractures, P - Pneumonia, E and R - Rebound hypersecretion.

Quick summary: We use the same letters to tie the side effects to the drugs themselves in this repeat mnemonic. When the PPI alone doesn’t work you might begin treatment for destroying Helicobacter pylori, the active organism in an ulcer. We’ll look at triple and quad therapy next.

So I’ll pop up this quiz here and here we go. So Ulcer Developer side effects we saw that which is a side effect of proton pump inhibitors and so constipation we actually have the opposite which is diarrhea from C diff infection or Clostridium difficile. Hyper magnesemia no we actually get low magnesium. Pneumonia yup that is a possibility again we’re reducing the acid in our stomachs and making it ourselves a little bit more vulnerable uh to bacterial attack and rebound hypertension now it’s actually worried about hypersecretion so you stop proton pump inhibitors the acid comes back.

So we’ll pop on there in pneumonia we’ll check our answer oh we said we’re gonna check and then we continue all right which organism causes diarrhea from taking proton pump inhibitors again that is Clostridium difficile he’ll mnemonic.

So again if you’d like to sign up for the email list you can at memorizingfarm.com. You just get our best pharmacology cheat sheet just sign up down here and I will see you guys next week.

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Proton Pump Inhibitors Mnemonic - ULCER DEVELOPER

This is advanced pharmacology mnemonic #3 of 134 that we'll be going over, I'll usually do a brief introduction, play the mnemonic from the course, then we'll do a couple of quiz questions to make sure you got what I was throwing down.

Find the book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to TonyPharmD YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

If you are interested in the mobile course go to https://residency.teachable.com/p/mobile 

If you are interested in signing up for the email list go to: https://www.memorizingpharm.com/

If you want to take pharmacology with me, you can find the course here: https://www.memorizingpharm.com/onlinepharmacologycourse

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Hey, welcome back to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra, your host and pharmacist. I wanted to go over proton pump inhibitors, not just because we’re going to do proton pump inhibitors and then in our next episode we’ll do the side effects and so forth, but I saw on Reddit somebody asking about, ‘Okay, how do I memorize all these drugs? They’ve given us 200, 300, whatever the number is, whatever the instructor gave you.’ And what I tried to do with the Memorizing Pharmacology book, the first edition was 200 drugs, the second edition is 350 drugs. You can just go to memorizingfarm.com if you just want the link to it.

What I wanted to get into was understanding how to take a drug class, kind of isolate it first and just say, ‘Okay, let me look at the drugs in this class first.’ Put those together and then what I’ll do is I’ll put them in order. So when you go into the Memorizing Pharmacology book, it’s intentional that you see antacids first, H2 blockers second and proton pump inhibitors third. Because when you’re looking at them you’d say, ‘Okay well what would be first? Well first I might just take an antacid. My stomach’s a little bit upset.’ Then you might say, ‘Alright well you know it’s kind of lasting a long time so maybe I’ll use an H2 blocker.’ And then when you have an ulcer as we’ll talk about in the ulcer developer mnemonic well then really proton pump inhibitors are probably where you’re going to go.

And all throughout the book that was the whole point is doing everything in an order that’s memorable because there’s a story with it. So that story that goes along with the book that’s what fixes the problem of ‘Oh I get it. They’ve given me 300 drugs. I just got to put some stories together.’ That makes sense so that I can remember not only the drugs but some of the side effects and what they’re for.

So you’ll hear the mnemonic and what it’s about in a little bit about each of these proton pump inhibitors but what I wanted to kind of get across to you is that in general when you are given a list they are not in the correct order which is why I created that list that you get when you join the email. Is that when you have them in the correct order that’s when your brain’s like ‘Oh I get it.’

And maybe a good example of this is there’s a show I think it’s called The Home Edit and when they organize closets and toys and all those things they actually use the rainbow. So remember ROY G BIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, violet whatever it is. And because they have it in that order you always know ‘Oh yeah I remember that book it was a blue book so it’s going to be here or I remember it was a red book so it’s going to be here.’

And all that matters is you do it in a way that is meaningful to you that’s helpful to you. And so when you listen to these and you’re kind of diving into the book or the course or whatever you’re doing you need to be thinking ‘Okay what’s the story I can put together?’ And the reason I wrote the book was my students are so busy and so exhausted it’s like ‘Well do you have time on the way?’ Well that’s the one place I have time alright great.

Just throw the book in before class. You can listen to the GI chapter. You understand the story of going from antacids to H2 blockers to proton pump inhibitors and then later on you kind of understand the story of okay well we’ve got anti-diarrheals versus those constipating drugs and things like that.

And so these stories come along another good example are the diuretics when we get to the cardiology section where you really want to go from the glomerulus all the way to the collecting duct and kind of begin at the glomerulus and then you know you go up the loop of Henle and then the distal convoluted tubule. And so you’ve got a great picture in your head.

Anyway, I went really long with this introduction so here’s the mnemonic for this week. And again if you need me tonythepharmacist@gmail.com.

Question number four: Name six proton pump inhibitors and their class suffix.

Number four: Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). We’ll use the mnemonic Ulcer Developer: D - Dexlantoprazole (brand name Dexilant), E - Esomeprazole (brand name Nexium), V - Lansoprazole (brand name Prevacid), E - Omeprazole (brand name Prilosec), L - Pantoprazole (brand name Protonix), O - Rabeprazole (brand name Aciphex).

Quick summary: Often someone who is an ulcer developer needs proton pump inhibitors for treatment. Our acrostic becomes Developer.

Before I go into proton pump inhibitors, let’s pause to talk about mistakes with suffixes. I just read another pharmacology mnemonic book that got this wrong. The World Health Organization (WHO) globally and the United States Adopted Names Council (USANC) agree on a drug beginning prefix middle.

The ending these organizations agreed on for the H2 blockers is tidin (T-I-D-I-N-E). I see students quoting quizzing note card websites as reliable sources. They write that drugs ending in en (I-N-E) are always H2 blockers. That’s untrue. Morphine, an opioid, and fluoxetine, an antidepressant, both end in en for example. This build your own suffix error is a cognitive heuristic bias. That means the note card and book authors believe something wrong to be right.

Back to our proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). The ending or suffix is prazol (P-R-A-Z-O-L-E). The suffix is not a zol (A-Z-O-L-E), an organic chemistry molecule. If you use that as your mnemonic or suffix then fluconazole, an anti-fungal, is grouped into proton pump inhibitors. The proper suffix for fluconazole is conazole (C-O-N-A-Z-O-L-E), suggesting anti-fungal. There’s also aripiprazole with the piperazole (P-I-P-R) stem for schizophrenia.

Using suffixes is powerful but when an author cites various suspect internet sources, you might want to look elsewhere. With this prazole ending, we can now talk about six proton pump inhibitors.

Some students connect the prazol stem with preventing and protons all starting with the per sound to remember this order. We’ll use the mnemonic Ulcer Developer with these drugs using the D, E, L, O, P and R of the word Developer.

D - Dexlansoprazole’s brand Dexalant stands for right-handed excellent because the right-handed enantiomer lasts longer than its racemic lansoprazole counterpart does.

E - Esomeprazole: While the prazole (P-R-A-Z-O-L-E) ending means PPI, the E-S means S for sinister or left-handed, the active enantiomer. The manufacturer released Nexium after Prilosec as the next PPI drug.

V E L - Lansoprazole’s Prevacid prevents acid. The prev in prevents coupled with acid will help you to remember.

O - Omeprazole’s Prilosec has the PR for hydrogen protons. Protons or hydrogen ions are what make an acid acidic. The low (L-O) for low (L-O-W) and the sec for secretion of those protons or the O in Prilosec looks like a zero and Pry O Sec provides zero heartburn.

P - Pantoprazole’s brand Protonix reverses nicks and protons. Pantoprazole like esomeperzole and rebeprazole comes in an IV form.

E and R - Rabeprazole brand Aciphex combines aci from acid, ph little p capital h from the ph scale and x to excrete.

We try to avoid working on more than four drug names at a time because it taxes our short-term memory. Here we have six drug names however two drug pairs have parallel routes.

Esomeprazole and omeprazole only differ by ES (S). These two letters ES mark esomeprazole as the left-handed enantiomer, the one with therapeutic benefit. Omeprazole is an S and R enantiomer mixture with the omeprazole root.

The other pair includes dexlansoprazole, the R plus enantiomer of lansoprazole, the racemic mixture with lansoprazole roots.

Your brain chunks these four medications into two couples like your credit card chunks four groups of four numbers: esomeprazole pairs with omeprazole and dexlansoprazole pairs with lansoprazole. Then it adds two singles: pantoprazole and rabeprazole to chunk down to a group of four units like this:

1 - Dexlantoprazole and Lansoprazole 2 - Esomeperzole and Omeprazole 3 - Pantoprazole 4 - Rabeprazole

Knowing these groupings is what makes pharmacology easier. If you had a pile of 400 coins stacked with pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters you could separate them by their properties: the pennies are copper, the quarters are largest and dimes smallest; what’s left are nickels.

In pharmacology we need to take two minutes to figure out what the properties are for the individual drug classes then it’s easy to sort them.

Although I focused on peptic ulcer disease you can use these PPIs for conditions like gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) which can rarely turn into Barrett’s esophagus. Barrett’s esophagus, when tissue like the intestinal lining replaces the esophageal tissue, often comes with a higher risk of esophageal cancer. Regular doctor visits for dysplasia or pre-cancerous cells are critical.

Ideally, a patient should take these medications 30 minutes before a meal to get the maximum benefit. Make sure to let the patient know that these medicines may take a few days to take effect and don’t work as quickly as antacids.

Now let’s take a look at the side effects related to PPIs. So as always we’re going to go into our quiz and what we recognize is now we’ve seen esomeprazole, omeprazole, pantoprazole. We see that these all have the same prazole endings and cetirizine does not. So cetirizine is an antihistamine, thus this would not be a proton pump inhibitor.

Okay, we go to the next one. What is the brand name of omeprazole? And again we could go back up but we want to see alright well Dexilant, that doesn’t sound right. Nexium, no that’s esomeprazole. Prevacid, that’s not quite it either. Oh yeah, Prilosec, that’s right.

Omeprazole was supposed to be Losec but Losec actually was so close to Lasix that they made them change it. So they thought, what about protons? So protons low secretion, that’s what they were thinking when they made the brand name Prilosec for omeprazole. We check and we see that that’s correct.

So again, the big thing with these is making sure that you’ve taken the time to look at many of them in the same place so that you recognize them. I will tell you about one drug class it’s a little bit goofy something like aripiprazole. It’s not supposed to be that way where you have a stem in a stem but those are antipsychotics and that would not be correct. So again, prazole is what we’re looking for as an ending.

Hey, thanks again for listening to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. Again, everything that I talk about is on the memorizingfarm.com webpage. Whether you need to do the Memorizing Pharmacology: A Relaxed Approach for those, the second edition is the one that I put on there just because it’s the newest but that’ll get you to 350 medications.

And then the Memorizing Pharmacology Mnemonics is what we’re going through now and making sure that you know once you get to that advanced level and you need to know those side effects and all those things that those are there as well.

If you are a pharmacology instructor, I’ve got a PDF here of a number of resources for you that could be helpful and again if you need my help tonythepharmacist@gmail.com.

 

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Free Audiobook Password Instructions for my Email List

In this episode, I'm going over the instructions on how to use the Free Audiobook password, but also the expansion of my pharmacology course. 

Find the book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to TonyPharmD YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

See all my audiobooks and use the password here https://www.memorizingpharm.com/freebookcodes

Join the pharmacology course with the coupon HALFOFF here there are some "preview" modules you can check out for free 

https://residency.teachable.com/p/mobile

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Alright, well I first wanted to thank you guys for joining my email list and I’ve just sent you the password for the free book. The way that you go and get it is you go to memorizingfarm.com forward slash free book codes and then you click on this Memorizing Pharmacology: A Relaxed Approach second edition.

What I’m going to do is I’m probably going to send these free codes out every other week or something like that and what I’m going to ask you to do is if you do take a code, please do take the time to review it. It really does make a huge difference. So even if you don’t have the time to do a written review, if you can just put ‘Oh, you know this was 5 stars, 4 stars,’ whatever you felt it was, I really appreciate it.

So again, to get to if you’re on the list, you’ve gotten the password in your email. Check your junk mail if you didn’t get it and then you just go to memorizingfarm.com forward slash free book codes. Go to Memorizing Pharmacology: Relaxed Approach second edition and then you will get a screen that looks like this and then you put in the password there.

Okay, if you want to look at any of the other books, it’s going to give you something like this where if you’re not an Audible member, you can join Audible and get a free copy of any of those books that I’ve written.

Okay, well let me talk about what I actually wanted to talk about today which is I’m updating the self-paced pharmacology course to add hundred and forty. It’s actually a little bit more than that, a hundred and forty mnemonics and new quizzes so I wanted to show you how that works.

So you go to pharmacyresidency.teachable.com. One of the big things I do, the reason why we’ve got kind of pharmacology and residency on the same page is one of the big things I do is I help students as they’re moving on to residency. My undergraduate major is actually English and I’m getting a second one in mass com but I’m really good at helping people with their papers and letters of intent and CVs to some extent but that’s why this is like this.

So you go to self-paced pharmacology course with mobile quizzes and videos and it’ll take you to this page where you’ve got the what is now the current self-paced pharmacology course. It has pharmacology basics GI musculoskeletal respiratory immune neuropsych cardio and endocrine and anytime you see let me tell you a little bit about Teachable if you see one of these little light bulbs it means that there’s a quiz associated with it if you see this it’s just a video no quizzes.

And then again this one’s a quiz that one’s a little bit more. So it works out to be like this is just top 200 and then this is more of a classroom lecture and then these are the original powerpoints that kind of go with that classroom lecture but I’ve had a lot of people ask me for more detailed mnemonics.

So what I’ve done is I’ve now added advanced mnemonic so I’ve only put in the GI so far there’s 16 of them and they take quite a while to go through but what I wanted to show you is this should actually say free preview. You can now go on it without paying anything and you can see the free preview.

And what it’ll do is you’ll go into it and it’ll start right away like this: Name four antacids and four side effects or interactions that concern you about antacids number one antacids okay so we’ll pause it right there. And these are from the Memorizing Pharmacology Mnemonics book.

And what people wanted was well I like hearing it but is there a way I can see it? And yeah, it’s in the book but they wanted it all together so what I’ve done is we’ve actually made it so that now it goes through the entire mnemonic and then got a couple quiz questions here.

I already did the quiz so let’s just look at the first question which of the following antacids have a laxative effect? We would look to the video and see that the laxative effect comes from magnesium hydroxide so we go down here see calcium carbonate aluminum hydroxide oh there’s my answer magnesium hydroxide and then both aluminum hydroxide calcium carbonate we check yep that’s the correct answer then hit continue.

Which of the following medications do antacid ions chelate with? So again chelation is that binding of like a multivalent cation so a plus two or plus three on the periodic table so it’s so important to have just a little bit of chemistry knowledge. And so we’re looking for which medications those are and we see okay ions chelation with fluoroquinolones and tetracyclines. It’s the eye from acidic meals from the mnemonic.

And so we see okay, fluoroquinolones, tetracyclines, just do a little check and that one’s correct. Okay, so that’s the way that this addition works and so what I’ve done is I’ve put in the first 18 for GI so that you can kind of have this visual of it and then it goes to H2RAs gynecomastia side effects, proton pump inhibitors, proton pump inhibitor side effects, what are the triple peptic ulcer disease, what are the quad peptic ulcer disease therapies, disulfiram reaction, prostaglandins diarrhea versus anticholinergic side effects, cholinergic side effects constipation nausea vomiting and then inflammatory bowel disease and then so forth.

So again, what I’m trying to do is give a more robust pharmacology course for you so that when you’re practicing this now you can go on your phone watch the video not just go to the next video do a couple of quiz questions and then go to the next video.

With these I’ll just put a couple quiz questions because the mnemonics do tend to stick a little bit better and it just gives you a ton more knowledge as you’re going into whether it’s NAPLEX or NCLEX or whatever it is.

So let me kind of go back to the beginning here. Okay, and so the way to check this out is to get to self-paced pharmacology course from residency.teachable.com and then go down to here where it’s going to be a free preview eventually where it’s going to save it eventually and you just go to this antacid one and click on that and then you can kind of see how it works and you know kind of go from there.

Again, if you’re listening to the podcast you always get half off of the price of the course. It’s normally 95 but it’s H-A-L-F-O-F-F all caps if you put that code in you can get half off.

So again please do join the email list. I will be sending out free audiobook codes every other week until I run out but I have a thousand codes to give out so I’m gonna kind of do this a little bit at a time and we’ll start with these first 50 codes for this Memorizing Farm second edition and hopefully this is something you guys will be looking forward to but I do want to again get in better touch with you guys and have that connection.

 

Like to learn more?

Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to my YouTube Channel TonyPharmD here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

Free Pharmacology Suffixes Cheat Sheet 

Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to my YouTube Channel TonyPharmD here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

If you'd like to become part of the MemorizingPharm.com community, please fill out the email form at the bottom of our page. 

https://www.memorizingpharm.com/

or you can check out our self-paced pharmacology course with the code HALFOFF 

https://residency.teachable.com/p/mobile

or take a completely online asynchronous class with me at in-state community college prices

https://www.dmacc.edu/programs/pdp/pre-pharmacy/Pages/online-pharmacology-class.aspx

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Hey, welcome to Memorizing Pharmacology Podcast. I’m going to be releasing a very big set of mnemonics. It’s going to be over 100 videos and I will release those probably once a week, maybe even twice a week as we move forward, so watch out for that.

I haven’t been in good touch with you guys and what I want to do is I really want to stay away from the email list but I’ve created one at memorizingfarm.com. If you’re on desktop, you just go down to the bottom. It’s our best pharmacology cheat sheet here’s free, just tell us where to send it and we’ll send it to you. I just want to know who you are and kind of who is in the group so that I can better serve you guys and understand what you guys want.

This is the cheat sheet that you get if you do want to join the email list to start. It’s the suffixes list from Memorizing Pharmacology second edition. Although it’s a top 200 drugs book, there’s actually 350 drugs. I kind of went a little bit overboard but there’s a lot of them that you really need to know like the antacids that wouldn’t show up on a top 200 drugs list or aspirin and things like that but it has the stems and suffixes and things like that.

Again, if you’re just looking for an introduction to pharmacology over the weekend, Farm Memorizing Pharmacology relaxed approach is seven hours. Memorizing Pharmacology Mnemonics about six hours or seven hours so that’s a little bit more advanced, this is a little bit more basic.

But I also have again for you guys if you want to have your own course kind of before you get into classes this fall, you can always get half off. You can enroll at residency.teachable.com forward slash P forward slash mobile and then if you want to take pharmacology with me there are six more spots left for the fall semester we unfortunately only take 24 in the fall 24 in the spring and then summer we we have up to 48 but you would go to just put in DMACC space pharmacology it’s the top course that pops up because we don’t charge out of state tuition so our tuition is like 175 dollars and then it’s like thirty dollars because it’s an online class and it’s a four credit class so it is um thorough but those that are looking for uh PA school or those that are looking to maybe make up a course that they didn’t get the grade they needed in nursing school those tend to be some of our students and then other students that really just going to a classroom twice a week three times a week at night in the day it just doesn’t work with your schedule or maybe you have a schedule and you want to get a little bit ahead those are all reasons but you’re welcome to contact me at Tony the pharmacarmacist gmail.com again Tony the pharmacist gmail.com and you can see the syllabus and see if that’s something that works for you it’s always up there and then there’s a couple of preview videos that you can see but it’s online pharmacology pharmacology phr185 and that’s something that we’ve had quite a few students take so again sign up for the email list so I can keep in touch and then over the next couple weeks I’m actually going to send in quite a few free audiobook codes out from audible they just give me these every time I get one and so I want to kind of reward those that you know just want to be part of the community so thanks again.

Like to learn more?

Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to my YouTube Channel TonyPharmD here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

Memorizing Dilution Solutions 

Find the book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to TonyPharmD YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Solving a stock solution problem in calculations. Want to check out the book, you can go here:

https://www.audible.com/pd/Memorizing-Pharmacy-Technician-Mnemonics-Audiobook/B09F8HPT5H?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-275680&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_275680_rh_us

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

 

Auto Generated Transcript:

All right, I wanted to talk about dilution and solutions. I saw this on social media and I thought it’d be good to review how to do it and show you how I do things. I teach introductory chemistry as well as pharmacology, so it’s really a lot easier to do this kind of math if you’ve already had chemistry because it’s so similar to the stuff that we’re doing.

Here was the question that was presented or something like this: How many mLs of a four percent stock solution do you need to compound 100 mL of a 0.04 dilution in distilled water? What I usually see is some kind of ratio proportion or something like that where they just start scribbling numbers in. What I want to give you is a much more regimented way that you can do it every time so it always works.

The first thing I like to do before I even mess with any equations is just to write down the variables in a way that’s clear. The first concentration is four percent. The first volume, well, it’s how many mL so we don’t even know. The second concentration is 0.04 and the second volume is 100 mL.

Now that I have my variables, it just makes it a lot easier for me to say okay, what kind of equation would have this kind of stuff in it? The equation would be concentration of one times the volume of one is the concentration of two times the volume of two. We do this in chemistry all the time where we take the molarity times the volume equals the molarity times the volume.

Somebody who’s taking introductory chemistry is just going to have a lot easier time with this because they’ve worked through this type of equation. It’s just a matter of putting your head together that oh, the M is a concentration would be the same thing.

Now this is where it gets a little bit tricky. It’s a lot easier here because we have this horizontal equation. We don’t have something over something equals something over something. We don’t have to get something from the numerator or denominator. So numerator is on top, denominators on bottom and we don’t have to get something from the denominator.

All we have to do is move this C1 to the right and the way that you do that is you multiply both sides by one over C1. So this would cross this one out and then the C1 would be under here. This is what it would look like, the isolated variable equation. So this is isolated, the V1 is on the left and C2 times V2 over C1.

Now this may be a little difficult for some because they prefer to have the number on the right side. You’ve always multiplied two plus two equals four not something equals two plus two oh that’s four. So it may or may not be difficult, I can do it either way but again I just prefer to just leave the isolated variable where it lay and just kind of work with that.

But this is the equation that we’re actually using: V1 equals C2 times V2 over C1 and then this is where you plug in the numbers: V1 equals 0.04 times 100 mL divided by four; V1 equals four mLs over four; and then V1 equals one mL.

Again if you have questions like this feel free to put it in either the YouTube video in the comments. I’m on Tony PharmD, sorry I couldn’t think of anything more clever or you can always send me something at tonythepharmacist@gmail.com.

But what I want to do is I want to show you how to do this in five seconds or less and this is how I would have done it. I wouldn’t have even gone through all of this, I’m just doing it so you can see how it’s done.

I would have just looked at this and said okay, I’ve got this concentration of four percent and this concentration is one one hundredth of that okay so in some way my answer is gonna have to do one to a hundred okay so if this is 100 mLs then this is probably just going to be 1 mL and that would have been it, I would have been done.

So if you’re wondering like ‘I don’t understand how does that person finish the test so fast?’ They’re not actually going through all those steps, they’re just intuiting it because they’ve done so many of them before like ‘Oh, it’s a solution problem or a dilution problem.’

So how can we make this so this actually sticks in our head because I think it’s really tough to visualize this if you have some stock solution you don’t actually have a name of anything and even if you did have the name of a medicine, have you had experience with that medicine to know what it looks like color it is?

What I did was I did this with milk which is something that everybody probably recognizes and what I do is I just change the question from how many mLs of a two percent milk do you need to compound 100 mLs of one percent milk. So it’s the same thing, I’m taking a higher percentage to a lower percentage, same number of mLs in distilled water.

Our variables are two percent, don’t know, one percent and 100 mLs. Our equation is the same: C1 times V1 equals C2 times V2. We isolate the variable same way: V1 equals C2 times V2 divided by C1 and now we plug in the numbers and we see V1 equals 0.01 times 100 mL divided by 0.02 that’s 1ml divided by 0.02 which is 50mls.

Now let’s look at this one more time and say, ‘Oh well, if I’m going from 2 to 1 percent and gonna go half, then what I expect is this number will be halved.’ Okay, so just like we did one hundredth before, you know we went from four to .04. We went from 100 to one. We’re going from two to one and one is half of two and 50 mLs. Our answer is one half of 100.

If you want to see some questions like this, I did a book memorizing pharmacy technician mnemonics. Again, I know I’ve talked about in the last couple episodes but what I did was instead of doing the math by the type of math, I did it by body system. So I did a GI problem in the GI section and a musculoskeletal problem in the musculoskeletal section.

But if you’ve got specific types of problems that are really bugging you and you’re like, ‘Okay well, I want to know how Tony would do this,’ then you know just give me an email or just throw it in the comments on Tony PharmD on YouTube and then just let me know.

But again, this kind of math is really all about this process. Let’s go to soccer because in soccer there’s an expression that you want to get there fast and arrive slow. Okay so when I say get there fast, what I mean is the first thing I do is I’m very quick about this. I just okay first variable, second variable, third variable, fourth variable.

Okay what’s my equation? Okay let’s isolate the variable. Now I go slow because I want to make sure okay concentration two, concentration two. Let’s not actually gently mix up C1 and C2. Okay, I put that one there V2 100 mLs okay C1 4 okay that’s going to be there.

So when we say you know get there fast arrive slow, we’re saying you know you can write down the variables very quickly because you know that that’s right in front of you. The equation maybe it takes a minute or two to kind of just like okay which one do I need to use but it’s so much easier when you have the C1 V1 C2 V2 like oh yeah yeah I remember this one I know what I’m doing.

And then isolating the variable requires just a little bit of math and then plugging in the numbers is the easiest part but the easiest to mess up because you know we’re a little too fast with it.

So again, you know I want you to succeed in these kinds of problems so make sure you take the time to give me a couple problems that you might be struggling with and I’m happy to solve them for you.

 

Like to learn more?

Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to my YouTube Channel TonyPharmD here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Memorizing DEA Schedule Medications - Memorizing Pharmacy Technician Mnemonics

In this episode, I give you five mnemonics to memorize the DEA Schedule Medications 

Find the book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to TonyPharmD YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

If you are interested in seeing the mnemonics book itself, you can find it here 

https://www.audible.com/pd/Memorizing-Pharmacy-Technician-Mnemonics-Audiobook/B09F8HPT5H?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-275680&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_275680_rh_us

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Hey, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. I’m Tony Guerra. If you ever need to get a hold of me, tonythepharmacist@gmail.com. I’m going to go over a number of mnemonics from the Memorizing Pharmacy Technician Demonic’s book. You can get it in eBook, audiobook or print book on Amazon or Audible.

And what I want to do is make sure that you understand and how to memorize the medications within the five DEA schedules. Let’s start with our first mnemonic C1 drugs and my mnemonic is One Helm H-E-L-M. And with this one, think that you have like one head so One Helm for the C1 medications that will definitely mess with your head. So H is Heroin, E is Ecstasy, L is LSD and M is Marijuana.

If you want to get technical the LSD stands for Lysergic Acid Diethylamide and Marijuana yes it’s legal in some states but the federal classification is still Schedule 1 but there are ways to use it.

Our second group is going to be with Schedule 2 medications and I say it’s Champ Fog. So with this one, I think of a two-time boxing champ and a fog with the medications in DEA Schedule 2. C for Cocaine, I get it Cocaine is illegal but they do use it in some especially Ophthalmic uses. H Hydrocodone and Hydromorphone, A Amphetamine with Emma Barbitol, M Methamphetamine Methadone Methylphenidate, P Pentobarbital and then the Fog part of it Fentanyl Oxycodone and Glutethamide.

So again, it’s Champ Fog Cocaine Hydrocodone Hydromorphone Amphetamine Ammo Barbitol Methamphetamine Methadone Methylphenidate Pentobarbital for the Champ and then Fentanyl Oxycodone Glutethamide for the Fog.

Schedule three medications there aren’t a ton of these I say Three Tax Tests so you’re imagining a test that you’ve got an A on with three tacks in the cork board you can remember Testosterone and the other meds in the C3 DEA drug schedule. So T Testosterone, AC is for Acetaminophen with Codeine 90 milligrams or less per dosage unit, K is Ketamine and S is for the Steroids Anabolic.

So T Testosterone AC Acetaminophen Codeine 90 milligrams or less per dosage unit K for Ketamine and S for Steroids Anabolic.

Now Schedule four drugs have a lot of medications and the majority of them are going to be Benzodiazepines with the Azepam or Azolam ending and that might be one of the easier ways to remember it but let me go through this list and talk about the mnemonic.

So the mnemonic for the C4 drugs for Calm Cats spelled C-A-T-T-T-Z and you think of four cats sleeping but just spelled differently for the DEA Schedule C 4 medications. So C is for Clonazepam some people like to call it Clonazepam that’s brand name Klonopin A is for Alprazolam brands Xanax L is for Lorazepam brand Ativan and M is for Midazolam brand Verset.

And what I would do is I would take the time to just memorize those four to start Cloneazepam Alprazolam Lorazepam Daisolam notice that the two endings of Azepam and Azelam are there from the Benzodiazepine and then move on to the Cat’s half of the mnemonic.

So then you go on to Carissa Protol Bransoma A for Ambien which is the brand name of Zolpidem T Tramadol Ultram T Tamazepam which is Resteril T Triazolam Halcyon and Z Zaloplan which is brand Sonata.

So again, The Four Calm Cats that’s what helps you remember the C4 medications but in general if you have a Benzodiazepine that’s probably on there and if you have a sleeping pill like Ambien which is Opidem or Xalaplan which is Sonata that’s probably going to be on there as well.

Our final group of the mnemonics is C5 drugs Five Paste so you’re pacing around because you’re worried that it’s a scheduled drug P is for Pregabalin which is brand Lyrica AC is for And Cough as in Robitussin AC or Charitas And AC which also could mean And Codeine E for Elixirs 200 milligrams of Codeine in every 100 mls and then D for Diphenoxylate with Atropine that’s brand Lamodal.

And again if you want to get in touch with me tonythepharmacist@gmail.com otherwise I will work to make a couple of more of these slides if you enjoy what you’re hearing just comment below on the YouTube videos and it just under the Tony PharmD channel and you can subscribe there as well as the podcast.

 

Like to learn more?

Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to my YouTube Channel TonyPharmD here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

Online Pharmacology Class - Summer 2022

Find the book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ 

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to TonyPharmD YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Guest student registration opens on March 16th, 2022, make sure to enroll as a guest student, the process is very easy and quick.  https://www.dmacc.edu/programs/pdp/pre-pharmacy/Pages/online-pharmacology-class.aspx if you have questions email aaguerra@dmacc.edu

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com

 

Auto Generated Transcript:

Hey, welcome to the Memorizing Pharmacology podcast. Just want to let you know that the online Pharmacology for summer is going to be opening up here on March 16th for guest students. So, current students will register on March 2nd if they are returning veterans and honor students. March 7th, the returning students have just started registering last yesterday and then new students and guest students can register on March 16th for summer and then the dates for fall are in April.

So most students that are taking the Pharmacology course, if you’re already a DMACC student then you would just add the course as you do other courses but if you are not, the easiest place to get to this is just put in online Pharmacology class DMACC and you can find this page which is the online Pharmacology class. The syllabus is there and there’s actually two sections in summer. This first 25 students is for fall and spring but you can go down here to non-DMACC students and take the class as a guest student.

And then when you click on this button it’s really just for exactly those students who are only looking to take a couple classes. You just apply for free, there’s no application fee or anything like that. And so when you click on the application for admission, you just click okay well I’m going to another college and university and I’m only going to take a couple classes or maybe just one class. So then there are no prerequisites for this class so you don’t have to worry about those kinds of things for this particular course.

And then you’ll get an acceptance letter by email and then you register for classes when guest registration opens which is in about eight days. So again, if you’re interested in taking an online Pharmacology class there’s a lot of information. Just put online Pharmacology class DMACC and then this page will pop up and hope to see you this summer.

 

Like to learn more?

Find my book here: https://geni.us/iA22iZ

or here: https://www.audible.com/pd/B01FSR7HLE/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-059486&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_059486_rh_us

and subscribe to my YouTube Channel TonyPharmD here: https://www.youtube.com/c/tonypharmd

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Courses: residency.teachable.com