PharmABCology: an initiative to create logical mnemonics systems for learning drug names

Abstract

With a handful of comprehensive pharmacology textbooks on the market, students in any healthcare discipline are likely able to find at least one book that suits their individual needs. The more challenging part for students, however, is to become better acquainted with drug names. Textbooks seldom provide meaningful ways to help readers remember drug names and/or their mechanisms. Existing mnemonics, not widely used among students in general, may lack in providing the learner with an intuitive or logical approach to mentally connect with the drug names. For example, names of persons, objects or action verbs were chosen by random to represent a particular drug class or therapeutic drug use. The pharmABCology project was conceived with the final aim of creating logical mnemonics systems for drugs that students will commonly encounter in their studies. In this pilot presentation, two approaches, one based on the alphabet system and the other based on pharmacological mechanisms, were demonstrated in the mnemonics for four classes of drugs: 1) anti‐dyslipidaemics, 2) anti‐dysrhythmics, 3) anti‐hypertensives and 4) anti‐ischaemic drugs. For the alphabetical approach, the names, drug classes or mechanisms of anti‐dyslipidaemics and anti‐hypertensives are listed in alphabetical order. The other approach takes advantage of the spellings of anti‐dyslipidaemic and anti‐dysrhythmic drug names in formulating a meaningful sentence or phrase that is readily associated with the mechanisms of actions of these drugs. Some of the mnemonics systems above had been used in a sample (n = 30) of students in undergraduate MBChB tutorials, and the feedback was overwhelmingly satisfactory based on a 5‐point Likert scale. Of the 22 respondents (73 % response rate), 10 (45 %) and 9 (41 %), respectively, strongly agreed and somewhat agreed that pharmABCology mnemonics system helped with the learning of drug names. In light of the early promising results, similar approaches will be used to develop mnemonics for other drug classes with the intention of publicising this learning tool to the pharmacy, nursing and students in other healthcare‐related disciplines.Support or Funding InformationNilThis abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.