Memorizing Pharmacology Podcast: Prefixes, Suffixes, and Side Effects for Pharmacy and Nursing Pharmacology by Body System

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

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

I just wanted to go over the free audiobook codes Google Sheet that will be sent out to our email list on Tuesday June 27th, 2023

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

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.

All right, I just wanted to kind of explain audiobook codes and how to use them in our next email, which should go out Tuesday. Today is the 27th, so if you're on the email list, the way to get on it is go to memorizingfarm.com and then scroll down to "Our Best Pharmacology Cheat Sheet - Yours Free". It's just a name and an address. But I just wanted to let you know what's coming to you. It's going to be a link to a spreadsheet that has all of the books that I've written, whether I've written it or it was in collaboration with someone else, but anything that my name is on. The 30 books that I have my name on. We have this individually on the website under "Books", but I thought it would be easier to just make a spreadsheet. So if you ever want to like, okay, I've done this one, what's the next book? How does that help and so forth? I think that that's going to be useful. So again, I'll send this link out to the website. But what I want to do is kind of explain how it works.

So here are the books, and it's just literally like here's the link to this book, and you know how to hear it on Audible, to hear the five-minute free introduction. And then what I'm going to do is I've just put the first seven books on there. The questions, answers, and rationales. The ones that go by pathophysiologic class: GI, musculoskeletal, respiratory, immune, neurocardio, and endocrine. Those are on sheet two. Those are the codes for each book. And you can see that there's US versus Great Britain. And I will explain how that works in just a minute.

But I've separated all the books by: it's either pharmacology books; residency, if you're looking for a residency and the interviews and things that go along with that; a couple of pre-med/pre-pharmacy/pharmacy student books I've written a long time ago; and then one family book that I wrote.

But again, these are the links to get to the free five-minute audio preview. And then if you want the book free, if you've never been on Audible, you can get it free there. But what these codes are: these are like free-free, if you want to use double of the same thing.

But I wanted to explain the difference between a US code and a UK code. So a US code is one where you are on audible.com. Okay? So audible.com is the US codes. Audible.co.uk is the UK codes.

But where the confusion comes is: well, I'm in the United States but I'm from England or Europe even; or I'm in Europe and I'm from the United States; or I actually have accounts in both.

So it has nothing to do with where you actually live. It has to do with which one you have an account to or which one you want to have an account to. So again, I think you could just make an account if you just wanted the code because there are more GB codes (Great Britain codes) than there are US codes simply because my fan base is mostly US and I'm an American in the middle in the Heartland in Iowa.

So but it doesn't mean that you can't use it. So what I want to do is kind of explain how it works.

So the first thing is: so you go down and you just kind of pick which book you want. So there's seven books here. And if it's GB up here, that means it's only Great Britain codes; that's all I've got left.

If it starts with "4 US codes", that means I have four US codes left and the rest are Great Britain.

And then if I have this many US codes and then I have that many US codes.

And so what you do is: you kind of pick whichever one it's going to be.

If you're in the US then you go to audible.com ACX promo and it looks like this. Okay, and you just literally copy and paste the code in here and you redeem. Okay, and you can see this is my Audible account. So, hi Anthony, I've got one credit available. Buy three extra credits if you want. I am someone who loves audiobooks as a listener, not only as an author. So I think I have over 700. It's when you have kids that that happens. Okay, and you'll notice that the one for the UK is the exact same, it's just audible.co.uk. I'm not signing in there because my account is with Audible proper.

Okay, but you're going to get something like this if you try to go to audible.co.uk. They'll look at your location and say okay well you're in Iowa, are you sure you meant to go to audible.co.uk? And if you just click on it then you get sent to audible.co.uk which looks the exact same except things are spelled in this way so instead of a Z with customize it would be S with a customize and everything is in pound sterling rather than in dollars.

So in terms of like where you go, it's really up to you. Just with what I've talked to people about is they said it's usually easier on a tablet or a computer to use promo codes that are in another country. They're just a little bit easier. I think it can be done on smartphones and so forth, it's just a little bit harder.

But I just wanted to explain what those were. So again thanks for being a loyal subscriber as it were. We just hit a big milestone recently so I'm glad to see so many of you are getting good value out of it.

If you do join, you get the cheat sheet which is basically top 350 drugs with the stems underlined for the ones that have stems and an orderly way to remember pharmacology. So if you're in a class what usually happens is that you get some kind of list of okay well here's the medication if you're lucky and it might be an alphabetical order.

And what you want to do is put it in the best order to memorize. So for example for GI, you would put the antacids first then the H2 blockers and the proton pump inhibitors because clinically most people are going to start with an antacid go over the counter find out that doesn't work exactly go to an H2 blocker that's twice a day and then if they have some kind of ulceration they've got a proton pump inhibitor.

But if you do it in that way not only are you learning the drug but you are learning the therapeutics. And so what I did was I did that for all the drugs like diuretics.

You absolutely want to learn starting at the glomerulus then you do the proximal convoluted tubule with Mannitol and acetazolamide then you go to the ascending Loop of henle with the Loop Diuretics like furosemide then you go to the distal convoluted tubule Hydrochlorothiazide and then the collecting duct where you really know you're talking about the potassium sparing diuretics, spironolactone better known.

So what I've actually done is already put everything in order in the pharmacology book and that's really what the mnemonics are is it's putting it in a memorizable order.

So my Tony farm D YouTube channel just started really with seven videos I made that was me just going up in front of the board and doing all the drugs for memory so no that wasn't it. It was that I took the time to put them in order to make it easiest to remember everything by pathophysiologic class.

So again watch for this on your email on Tuesday the 27th. I'll get that out there and then again you can just kind of explore and see which links you know you like and certainly give me some feedback if you can.

I think I titled it something like You can always contact me at [email protected] but ive got For example, the Medical Coding Mnemonics has been really popular with that group of medical coders. They don't get a ton of audiobooks, and then the Pharmacy Technician one also made one that makes it a lot easier to just study for the test, you know, on your way to work and back and so forth. So let me know what you think. But yeah, that's going to be the audiobooks and again I'll put that in your email next Tuesday, June 27th. So if you do get on the list now, we'll have it to you next week.

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. 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

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

Antibiotic Prefixes and Suffixes

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:

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've recorded penicillins and cephalosporins, but before I go on, I have to address antibiotic prefixes and suffixes. These can be really useful, but you can also fall into a number of mistakes because there are so many mistakes on the electronic note cards. I've contacted a couple of the companies and said, "Hey, you know, my stuff is up on your note cards. I don't care that my stuff is on your note cards. Well, I do, but what I really care about is that they're wrong."

And I know that it's a lot easier to use somebody else's note cards when you're on one of those websites, but you have no idea what grade they're getting in their class. You don't know if they're taking it again and they failed the class or what. So I want to go over prefixes and suffixes for 14 of the most common antibiotic prefixes and suffixes that will help you. But let me first define this term heuristic cognitive bias.

A heuristic is a shortcut. Someone who's making these note cards says, "Well, I saw penicillin, amoxicillin, ampicillin. They all end in -cillin. Therefore, all penicillin-class antibiotics end in -cillin." And we don't really teach logic anymore, and anyone going to college probably would take ethics instead of formal logic. So these errors I'm talking about have their names in formal logic, and I'm not going to get into that as much as just kind of explain the issue.

So they found that this was true, and what they did was say, "Well, here I am finding that -cillin has a shortcut for penicillins. Then I can make shortcuts for other drug classes." So here's where the cognitive bias comes in. The cognitive bias is the error from the shortcut. "Every antihistamine I've seen ends in -ine. Therefore, all antihistamines end in -ine." But diamohedronate is an antihistamine and that doesn't end in -ine.

So again, it's that cognitive bias that everything they had seen in their experience was -ine, so it must be right. And that's just not true. The real issue comes from the next step that they make. And again, I'm not going to go into the formal logic. But if all antihistamines end in -ine, then all drugs that end in -ine are antihistamines. Let's put that in online flash card and help other people.

Their intent is solid. They want to help other people by publicly posting their note cards. That's great. But they're just plain wrong. Morphine ends in -ine and that's an opioid. Fluoxetine ends in -ine and that's a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Cephyroline is a cephalosporin and that ends in -ine.

What they're trying to do is they're trying to create a shortcut so they can make sense of pharmacology. And that's completely understandable. But the issue is that they're just wrong with the stems because they're not coming from a reliable source. And I can look pretty quickly at one of those note card sets and say, "Yep, that one's wrong," or "That one's right."

So what I want to do is go over the correct antibiotic prefixes and suffixes of the most common drugs, explain a little bit about some confusion between -mycin and -mycin, and then show you some of the errors that you're going to see, just to create an awareness of these antibiotic prefixes and suffixes and how you can use them, how you can rely on them, but where the pitfalls are, where you can't really use part of it. Okay, so the first one is ceph, the cephalosporins: cephalexin, ceftriaxone, cefepime, and cephyroline. So cephalexin, first generation; ceftriaxone, third generation with the tri; cefepime is that maxipeam, the fourth generation; cephyrholenus, fifth. And this is consistent. Okay. And it's common that penicillins and cephalosporins are two of the first drugs that a pharmacology teacher will teach because they affect the cell wall and they're related. Cyclin, this is a tetracycline type antibiotic. And sometimes you'll see them cut it off where they say l-i-n-e is what makes it tetracycline or just in. And those are both incorrect. So it has to have that cycline to make it a tetracycline class antibiotic. And again, tetra meaning four and then cyclin, four rings with organic chemistry. Floxacin, this is a fluoroquinolone. It's not going to be on the stem list. And I'll go into oxyacin in a little bit. The FL is actually a substem saying that there's a fluorine atom in there. And then the oxyacin is really what's telling you that it's a quinolone antibiotic. But this again is pretty consistent. So ciprofloxacin, levofloxacin, you can be pretty confident that it's going to be a fluoroquinolone. Casein, so an antibiotic obtained from the streptomyces canamyceticus and then related to canomycin. Or we have to be careful here is that we're saying okay casein comes in amication and we can say it's an antibiotic but we can't necessarily say it's a certain class of antibiotics. So amicasin just happens to be an amino glycoside but we're going to see in just a second that it might be an antibiotic but it doesn't necessarily tell you what class of antibiotic. So the ones that we had before though, the ceph for cephalosporin, bacillin for penicillin, the cyclin for tetracycline and then even the floxacin for fluoroquinolone, those were reliable for helping us know the class of antibiotic. But casein, this might not be one that we can do that with. And let me get to the next slide. Mycin is really a troublemaker. So mycin, the antibiotics coming from the micro monospora strains: you have gentamicin which is an amino glycoside but you have fedexamicin which is a macrolide. So already we see two completely different antibiotic classes with identical suffixes. So some of these suffixes will allow you to learn that it is an antibiotic and some will allow you to learn that it's an antibiotic and a specific class. It just depends. Okay? This mycin which many people pronounce as myosin, they insert an a vowel in there, it's actually difficult to pronounce this together. This comes from the streptomycy strain and clarithromycin is a macrolide; clindamycin is a lincosamide; and vancomycin is a glycopeptide. So the mycin isn't reliable for telling you the class that it comes from and I'll talk a little bit more about that t-h-r-o substem in clarithromycin how you might be able to use it to help you with macrolides in the United States but we have we can't really use this mycin to help with classification and we also want to be careful because midamycin is actually for cancer. Okay? Nitazole or nidazole depending on how you pronounce it this is an antiprotozoal and we see metronidazole quite often and I'll talk about how this stem gets a little bit messed up with that azul uh functional group oxacin so antibacterials and I mentioned the fluoroquinolone before so this is the quinolone derivative and oxacin is the actual stem that the World Health Organization has come up with but we really only see fluoroquinolones these days so the floxacin tends to be what most use to say okay well this is a fluoroquinolone antibiotic all right uh just five more here uh prim so it's a trimethoprim like and then trimethoprim is one that you use often with urinary tract infections very simple urinary tract infections or in combination with number 12 you know it's alpha methoxazole as that smz TMP the rifa antibiotic which is erythromycin derivative, so in the US we call it rifampin but outside the US and on the World Health Organization essential medicines list you'll see rifampicin. So again, this prefix is pretty consistent and then rifibutin. I'll talk about that in a sec but this rifa rifa is a pretty consistent prefix. Rifabutin is what we substitute for rifampin when we're working with TB patients that have HIV and we are using a protease inhibitor. So we don't want to use rifampin in that case or a phampasin. 12 is sulfur, again another prefix that's pretty consistent: sulfamethoxazole and sulfadiazine. Sulfadiazine's for severe burns. Sulfamethoxazole usually in combination with trimethoprim, we'll see for UTIs. Number 13 is thromycin. I see this a couple times on those note cards. It's not actually on the stem list. The mycin is as part of that streptomycy strain but you can be pretty confident with azithromycin, clarithromycin and erythromycin that those three are macrolides in the United States. However, fedaxomycin is a macrolide and it doesn't end in t-h-r-o-m-y-c-i-n. So again, we want to be careful with this one, kind of put a little asterisk next to it. Number 14 is zolid, oxazolidanone antibacterials like linezolid and that's a solid one. Okay, so going on to the errors that you'll see, a lot of times you'll see these note cards saying that own means a steroid and they're thinking of prednisone or deltasone or prednisolone, testosterone. Okay, the stem in testosterone is s-t-e-r for steroid. Stem in prednisone is p r e d for a prednisone type steroid. You'll also see some of the note cards saying that own is for opioids like hydrocodone or oxycodone and you might even see and I didn't put this on here own is for a diuretic like spironolactone. Okay, so that own is completely unreliable. You can't use that because here you see it's at the end of ceftriaxone and it's a cephalosporin. That's not a stem that's going to really lead you astray. I mentioned earlier about the in from antihistamine but I've even seen someone say that on one of the note cards that it's CNS stimulants and what they were thinking of um was like dexedrine, one of the brand names for uh the ADHD medication and those types of things. So again, in actually is at the end of around 18 and 19% of all medications, completely unreliable for giving you a drug classification. The next one we want to watch out for is this l-i-n-e so line is not uh a stem but I've seen many many cards say that it's a tricyclic antidepressant. What they're referring to is amitriptyline and the whole of tryptaline is what makes a tricyclic antidepressant. And I think the reason that this happens so much is that we don't really see nortriptyline much anymore but if you were to have seen amitriptyline and nortriptyline next to each other then you say oh okay I see there's a much longer stem there t-r-i-p-t-y-l-i-n-e. Same thing with fluoroquinolone, they'll actually put the drug class with the own saying that that is a steroid or something like that. So again, another one to really watch out for and the next one you'll see all the time that azole is the ending for antifungals. I can give you many many examples where this is wrong so metronidazole is an antiprotozoal then you have something like a proton pump inhibitor like esomeprazole that ends in azole and the stem there is prezzle sorry and then you have drugs like aripiprazole which are antipsychotics and the stem is piprazole so azole a-z-o-l-e this is an organic chemistry stem it's unreliable for drug classification and you'll also see this and I put this In the next slide with sulfamethoxazole, the azole stem will lead you wrong as well. Okay, so what I want you to take away from this is that you can use prefixes and suffixes if you get them from the proper source.

The United States Adopted Names Council list, the World Health Organization list, those are the ones that I used for memorizing pharmacology and that's really what you want to use. If you're going to use those note cards, I know it takes a lot of time to make your own but that's ideal. If not, at least take the time to look at these 14, make sure that the cards that you're using don't have these errors.

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

Cutting Pharmacology Study Time in Half

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 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 [email protected] 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.

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Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics Pharmacology Mnemonics

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

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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.

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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?

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Twenty Herbal Supplement Pharmacology Mnemonics in 10 Minutes

Usually, you get this big list of herbals in pharmacology class with way too much information and it's so nice to be able to know what they all are for before embarking on what's the side effect or drug interaction.

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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. And 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.

All right, welcome to episode 83: 20 top herbal supplement pharmacology mnemonics. What I want to show you in terms of memorizing these is that when you get this list, and what usually happens is you do get a list of 10, 15, 20 herbals, and what you really want to do first before you dive into St John's Wort interacts with other antidepressants or with antidepressants or all the G's have some issues with blood thinners and those types of things, the first thing is you want to know what every single one of them does, just like you know what aspirin does or just like you know what acetaminophen does. So let's get into the herbals. Make sure that you know what each one of these is for.

Aloe vera or aloe: Just take the A and L from aloe to remind you that it's probably a lotion, although it's going to be a gel probably, and it alleviates burns, especially sunburn. We've probably used it before.

Black cohosh: This is for hot flashes. We're talking about post-menopausal symptoms or you can use it for premenstrual symptoms as well. But you're going to take the H-O-S-H from cohosh and take the HO to make it an HOT and then the FLA you're going to put in front of the SH. And so just like a dining room table leaf, you're just going to put that in there to make it black hot flash.

Cannabis: One of the big things, especially with chemotherapy, is you just don't want to eat. I have a friend who had chemo and he just said food had no taste. So the mnemonic here for cannabis is can eat biscuits. We're going to take the CA and BIS from can and biscuits. We got a picture here. And this not only decreases the nausea and vomiting or the feel the need to have emesis but also increases your appetite.

Cranberry: We're going to use ran to the B bathroom because that's usually for UTIs. It's going to acidify the urine.

Echinacea: So there's a lot of vowels in here, especially C and E which are great for boosting the immune system. Let's just take that knowledge that we already have, add it to echinacea to show that that's boosting the immunity. Got a little picture of a battery here with a boost right.

And so Elderberry we're just going to put that right next to it because it also elevates and we'll say Elders immunity.

Evening primrose: We're going to use either that E for eczema or the Z in Primrose the way it sounds for the Z and eczema. We're going to kind of put by itself so fever few is something that creates few fevers. It was known as the medieval aspirin. And so when you think about what aspirin does, it's good for headaches, for inflammation, for arthritis. And you got a little arrow slit that looks like an eye and you can think of medieval eye or inflammation.

G: So put all the G's together. For whatever reason all the G's cause some kind of issue with blood thinning but let's talk about what they're for.

Garlic: This is for heart disease or cholesterol and if you think of garlic and vampires and the stake goes in the heart so just think heart with garlic.

Ginger: Think of ginger ale. My grandma always offered me some ginger ale when my stomach didn't feel good so ginger ale calms your stomach. It's for morning sickness and nausea.

Ginkgo biloba: So don't let your memory go or biloba blood flow. There's a little bit of alliteration there. Alliteration is the same first consonant sound. So all we're doing is just trying to remind ourselves ginkgo go for memory and blood flow.

Ginseng: Man I or ginseng (and some people pronounce it) I don't know memory and erectile dysfunction I guess if your erectile dysfunction was fixed you would sing but I don't know what to do with that one.

Glucosamine: So your glued joints get moving and so we got a picture of a runner here but glucosamine glued joints get moving.

Hawthorne extract: The H for heart disease or hypertension so give a little picture of a heart.

Kava: What I thought was kava I thought anxiety and insomnia is what it's for but really kava is the opposite of java.So, Java is another name for coffee. It has to do with the island that it was sourced from a long time ago. So just think of Kava as the opposite of Java. Milk thistle avoids liver dismissal, so it avoids liver damage. We have a little picture of a liver here. And then omega-3 fatty acids, those are for triglycerides. And again, the prefix Tri means three, just like a triangle has three sides, a tricycle has three wheels.

Then we go to the S's and V's. Saw palmetto is for benign prostatic hyperplasia or BPH. You just use the S and P in saw palmetto for S and P in swelling prostate because that's what's happening. St John's Wort is for depression. And when you think of a worry wart, someone who worries a lot, they're usually depressed. And I get it or worry we're probably leaning more towards anxiety but go with me here.

All right, so St John's Wort depression got somebody here who's just overwhelmed by their classes. Okay, a little bit depressed. And then valerian root anxiety so it keeps you rooted. So I've got a little picture of somebody doing yoga that's keeping you rooted or some people call it the herbal Valium.

So Valerian and Valium which is a benzodiazepine also helps you. So what you should be able to do after you go over this a couple of times is you should be able to go to this list of 20 and you should be able to quickly go through it.

So Aloe Vera is a lotion that alleviates burns. Black cohosh is for the hot flash. Cannabis can eat biscuits for that nausea vomiting increasing appetite. Cranberry ran to the bathroom UTIs echinacea the CE vitamins to boost your immunity or see a boost in immunity.

Elderberry elevates Elders immunity. Evening primrose is for eczema or Primrose eczema F is for fever few few fevers the medieval aspirin the headache inflammation and arthritis.

The herbals, the G's, the five G's in alphabetical order garlic remember for those vampires and hearts or heart disease and cholesterol Ginger you got ginger ale for morning sickness or nausea ginkgo biloba don't let your memory go below the blood flow ginseng again you're singing because your erectile dysfunction is gone and your memory's back I guess glucosamine was those glued joints get moving then Hawthorne effect or Hawthorne extract is for heart disease the H for heart kava is or Kava is for anxiety and insomnia exactly what Java causes so coffee causes anxiety and insomnia milk thistle avoids liver dismissal or liver damage omega-3 fatty acids three makes try saw palmetto for swelling prostate using the s p which is BPH St John's Wort is for depression the worrywart and then valerian root anxiety keeps you rooted or Valium of benzodiazepines.

So again keep going through this video until you get it it's only a couple minutes long I hope this helps you and as always this information is provided to you for informational purposes only is not intended to provide or should not be relied upon for medical or any other advice I urge Watchers or readers to consult with a medical professional with a medical condition 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.

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How to Pass Chemistry on the First Try

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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 [email protected].

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

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

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How Much Pharmacology is on the NGN NCLEX

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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.

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Male and Female Reproductive Pharmacology Suffixes

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I hit some of the high points in reproductive male and female pharmacology regarding prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. If you want a more detailed review, you can check out the audiobook: 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

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, I wanted to go over male and female reproductive pharmacology suffixes. I'm Tony Guerra, your host. Just wanted to make sure that I say suffixes, but we're going to see some things that are in between which are technically infixes versus prefixes and so forth. So let's just take a look here at what we're kind of dealing with.

So testosterone, a lot of people think the 'one' is what makes it a certain type of drug but really we're talking about these male hormones. We're really talking about the 'ster' for steroid and you'll notice that 'sterone' is also in progesterone but the male hormone is testosterone brand AndroGel which is a controlled substance. It can be, I guess addicting is the way to put it, and it's an anabolic steroid something that is going to build up muscle versus remember catabolism, anabolism. Catabolism breaks down or crushes, anabolism builds up.

Estrogen, the 'estr' is uh was Premarin and that came from pregnant mare's urine so the 'prma' and 'in' for prma Rin and then progesterone the progestin this is the other half of it. So when we look at these individually you know I always think of the Four A's with testosterone and we got this really brave guy here and this really anxious guy here but there is that addictive potential it is C3 it can cause anxiety okay can cause acne so kind of think about uh you know really what is it like to be a high school guy is what I was thinking is like well you've got to deal with um potential for you know addiction with uh you know whether it's video games to other stuff you've got anxiety being you know accepted by your peers you've got acne and then aggression as you kind of go through puberty and all those things so testosterone that's kind of testosterone in a nutshell.

We then go to kind of understanding okay well let me identify which one is the progestin and which one is the estrogen and the way again to do that is the 'gest' g-e-s-t is the progestin and the 'estr' is the estrogen so this is trisprintech which is a um one of our combined birth control pills slight risk of blood clots smokers really should just be using progestin only there can be significant cardiac effects and how long do you have to wait as a smoker well really you should be waiting almost a whole year before if you stop smoking to go on an estrogen type to avoid that increased cancer risk.

In terms of cancer risk, you're going to usually see breast and cervical go up endometrial ovarian and colorectal go down but the pictures here the breathe and the heart are specifically for that smoking to use progestin only versus a combination pill when we talk about alpha blockers and five Alpha reductase Inhibitors we're really talking about a kind of a one-two punch for BPH or benign prostatic hyperplasia where the immediate relief comes from tamsulosin or Flomax okay so this is an alpha one blocker.

The problem is it doesn't actually fix the problem it just allows you know easier urine flow so you're going to see some of those adverse effects which you'll see with any Alpha blocker first dose phenomenon or syncope where somebody gets kind of a fainting hypertension reflex tachycardia though these things are much less likely than their than tamsulosin's cousins like doxazosin and terazosin or terazosin however you pronounce however you want to pronounce it and those guys but still possibility because Alpha One really pregnant women foreign.

And you're going to see that this is kind of the first thing you give and you'll give them together but this is kind of providing relief during the months that it takes for The Other Drug to work so it works quickly it's going to eventually be removed you're not going to give both medications for the long term so what we're trying to do long term is we're trying to shrink the prostate and do testosteride or finasteride those are the two drugs that do it avidart is dutasteride finasteride.

Finasteride is one of those weird drugs that has two brand names for two different indications so the Propecia side of finasteride a much smaller dose is going to help with somebody's male pattern baldness or hair growth and then the Proscar is prostate care so caring for the prostate that has BPH. So the 5-alpha reductase inhibitor, it's really stopping DHT that's what it's doing. You've got to worry about ED, decreased ejaculate and libido, gynecomastia and hair growth and you can see that somebody who's dribbling or having this issue with BPH might say you know what those adverse effects are not worth it to me so compliance may be an issue. Contradicting pregnant women, you don't want them to handle it. You would have to double glove if you did and then it takes up to six months to work.

So again, Tamsulosin first and just think of the alpha as the first um you know Alpha One as the first and then the five Alpha as the one that comes a lot later and because five months is close to six months you can think of five Alphas about how long it's going to take for this to hit its full effect. Sildenafil versus Tadalafil so these are for rectal dysfunction, the stem is a fill afil and they increase nitric oxide to help with the erection so phosphodiesterase five Inhibitors now priapism or priapism however you decide to pronounce it is a four hour erection and an emergency.

There are some treatments for it I'm not going to go over them but the key is that um if it's a four hour erection you really don't want to um you need to go to the hospital. It's contraindicated with nitroglycerin and that's because it would create a tremendous drop in blood pressure and this is the big difference like well why would I take Viagra versus Tadalafil. And when Viagra first came out it was Sildenafil okay but once Tadalafil came out you saw the bathtubs or the two bathtub commercials and the reason for that is that it lasts up to 36 hours.

So Sildenafil if you think the time is right and the time is wrong well you're out of luck but Tadalafil provides more forgiveness for the entire weekend and then that was the kind of big big difference between the two. Okay uh just a little bit about our story with the triplet pregnancy for those of you that don't know right now I have three 11 year old girls they'll be turning 12 in July but there are a couple of drugs that kind of came along uh on the ride with us and that allowed them to be uh how they are now.

But uh Metformin uh was the drug that we use not Clomiphene so Clomiphene is a drug that is often used for those that can't um conceive and Metformin just did the trick. And so there's only a one in ten thousand chance of having triplets uh it's very unlikely so that was great but what happened was we had the chance and we did not take it to abort one of the children um to increase the chances of the other two and we turned that down and that was what we thought was oh my God we've killed them all because they almost came out at 19 weeks.

One of the girls just kind of decided and she's is the alpha she's the one that's just like she's already moved to you know another room in the house you know basically uh you know on her way out at 11. But uh Magnesium what was needed to stop the contractions uh she my wife went mag toxic and Nifedipine, the calcium channel blocker, dihydropyridine suppresses contractions uh long enough for them to start getting Betamethasone which is that steroid injection that helps with their lungs.

And they were delivered at 27 weeks in three days so the magic number is 28 weeks we got almost there uh it was actually I think time for almost another shot coming up and unfortunately they didn't get it, that would have made it alot easier for them but uh you know uh just uh really really lucky and um you know this was our first, second and last and I have a whole blog at ankenytriplets.com. But just I just want to show you, I think I talk too much about the words and don't show you what the impact is but this is what happens when you when the medications go right and you discover these things and you can have someone that's as tiny as they are uh survive and thrive. So this is Brielle um, we thought she was praying but maybe she was just kind of relaxing and just kind of putting the you know the hands to the side.

Our entrepreneurial one uh this is Tegan and she's got her 20 bill right there but we're just trying to show how small they really were. So if you look at your you know billfold and take out a dollar, you can see they're just an inch or two bigger than the dollar bill or your iPhone really um. This is if you just want some perspective, this is my index finger and um this is Rhian who's wrapping her fingers around my finger so just tiny tiny and you can see just how how um thin that skin is as they're in the giraffe okay.

And they're they have their uh sun, I call them sunglasses on but they have their little visor on there because they're trying to avoid chronic Terrace and they're under the UV light. And then I think this picture really shows as I'm taking the temperature under the arm there just how tiny uh they were and how fragile they were and just uh what a real miracle it was. So just uh thankful for all the medications and how it all worked out.

Again, this information is provided for informational purposes only, not intended to provide or should not be relied upon for medical or any other advice. I urge watchers, listeners, and readers to consult with a medical professional with any medical condition. Again if you need me, Tony the pharmacist at gmail.com.

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