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


Jul 7, 2021

Antacids Mnemonics and Pharmacology

In this episode, I provide a video version of a mnemonic in my book Memorizing Pharmacology Mnemonics which you can find 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 Coursesresidency.teachable.com

Auto Generated Transcript:

 

Hey, welcome to Episode 2 of the Memorizing Pharmacology Podcast! Just as we went over H2 blockers in the first episode and talked about suffixes and prefixes, some students want something a little more advanced. What I did was create a video that represents what's in *Memorizing Pharmacology Mnemonics*.

In terms of the order, *Memorizing Pharmacology: A Relaxed Approach* is really a top 200 drug book. It's a little over seven hours long, but it can definitely be done in a weekend if you need to prepare for a pharmacology class or catch up with it. If you want a little more advanced book, then *Memorizing Pharmacology Mnemonics* is a great choice as well because this one is really going to help you. The video will be about 10 minutes long, going over antacids, not only how to remember a number of the popular antacids, which don't have stems, prefixes, or suffixes because the generic name and chemical name are the same (we've got sodiums and calciums and aluminums and so forth). But again, check this out and enjoy the show.

*Memorizing Pharmacology Mnemonics #1: Antacids*

Hey, I just wanted to tell you about a new book I wrote. What I wanted to do was create a review for my students that will allow them to prepare for their final exam, but I'm doing that in a quite different way. I'm not just saying, "Here are the questions you need to know the answers to," or even giving necessarily just a plain review. What I'm doing is I'm really helping you get past the just understanding part. So often, professors are very good at helping a student understand, but they don't always give them the tools that they need to memorize something for an exam. Because in the exams or on the NCLEX, NAPLEX, USMLE, when we're getting to those big exams, that's when we really have to have our memory down so that we can do the higher-level understanding and work through. But let me show you how it works.

 

So the book is called *Memorizing Pharmacology Mnemonics*, and I changed the title a bunch of times. I think this is what I'm going to stick with: *Memorizing Pharmacology Mnemonics: Pharmacology Questions and Answers for the Future Nurse, Doctor, Physician Assistant, and Pharmacist (Chemist) - Kindle Edition*. I put all of those different professions in there. I'm not trying to exclude anybody else who wants to read it, but I put them all in there because we're inter-professional now. We're working on outcomes, not necessarily worried while we are worried about our individual exams. I think pharmacology crosses across those. And the courses I have include pre-meds, pre-pharmacy, pre-nursing or nursing, pre-physician assistant, pre-dental, physical therapy, and I have all these different groups. When I just talk about one group, then I exclude the others. So I wanted to make sure to include everybody in this interprofessional book.

 

You can read it two ways: you can just skim the 131 mnemonics in there, and you'll see what they look like and just look at the slide and say, "Oh, okay, I'm getting antacids. I just want to put that in my head. Then H2 blockers, then proton pump inhibitors," and you know from my past books that everything is in a memorizable order, so you can memorize the entire book and the entire bank of slides as well. Or you can read it slowly, and you can go through each drug class.

 

But what I've done is I've created a question and answer format, so it's not just here are 131 mnemonics. The big mistake people make is that a mnemonic is an answer. So if you're just reading a book with mnemonics, you're just reading a book with answers; you don't have the questions, right? So the mnemonic that you know maybe has "morphine" as the word, and all the side effects of morphine never bothers to ask you and engage your brain and say, "What are the side effects of morphine?" So I've kind of fixed that part. And as you go through the book, I've used page breaks so that it goes question, and that's all you see on the page. And then you can flip to the answer and then go back to the question if you didn't quite remember it, back and forth, and then move on to the next one. So again, it can be read fast, or it can be read slow.

 

I get this inspiration from when I take piano every once in a while, and there's always a fast and a slow version of each of those. And you can get it here. Obviously, you can't link from the picture, but I'll put the link in the video bottom. So let's get started.

 

**Question 1: Name four antacids and four side effects or interactions that concern you.**

 

Here's the first question: Name four antacids and four side effects or interactions that concern you about antacids. And so what you might do is start thinking, "Um, well, Tums is an antacid, and let's see, I heard that it might cause constipation." And you have this very roundabout way of learning it, and what I wanted to do is, no, here, this is the order that you can learn it in such a way that you can memorize it quickly and be done with it. So this is all about efficiency. This is all about getting it done quickly and keeping it in your brain quickly. We're not going to have any of this, "Oh, I just read a whole chapter, and I don't remember anything." No, no, we're doing quite the opposite.

 

Okay, so here's the answer: "It's acidic meals," and that's going to be our mnemonic that we're going to work with. And I'm going to show you how we go through each of the letters, and we don't always use all of the letters, and you'll see that here. But we will use a majority of them, and you'll see how that fits into something that you can memorize. So we begin with aluminum hydroxide, which is branded as Amphojel. And then we say, "Okay, well, that's good. That's one." Number two, calcium carbonate, which comes as Tums and Pepto Children's. So if you're just kind of burning through this, you say, "Okay, I'm just trying to remember what they are." But in the book, I talk about how Tums and Pepto Children's both have that calcium carbonate, but that's not Pepto-Bismol. Pepto-Bismol is bismuth salicylate, which you can't use in a child because it has an aspirin-like component. It can cause Reye's syndrome, a terrible, terrible disorder. So there are many more details in the actual book. But if we're just kind of burning through it, trying to remember, "Hey, what are four ant

 

acids, and what are four side effects that concern me about antacids?" That's what I need to know. So we're going to keep going. So those are two of the antacids, and we attach them to "A" and then the "C" of "acidic." Because although you don't really—it's not really the acidic meal; it's the acidity that comes from the meal. It just kind of stuck, is a good way of remembering it. So the first side effect or the first issue that we have is decreased phosphate with aluminum hydroxide and calcium carbonate. I intentionally put the chemical names here because sometimes you'll see them that way, or sometimes you'll see them spelled out in this way. But again, aluminum plus three—that means that we have three hydroxyls or three OH groups with negatives, and then we're going to have three of those to attach the plus three. Calcium is plus two, CO3 two minus. So that goes together as calcium carbonate. But this decreased phosphate can also help someone that has hyperphosphatemia.

 

Then we go on to the ions and the concern about chelation. So chelation with fluoroquinolones and tetracyclines—you can think about some of the fluoroquinolones that are out there: ciprofloxacin, levofloxacin. So the "C" and the "L" from chelation, and then the "T" from tetracycline to remember the tetracyclines are also an issue. Chelation is a binding that makes it inactive or makes the fluoroquinolone or tetracycline antibiotic inactive. So we want to separate these antacids from those two drug classes by a certain number of hours. And then the next one is constipation from aluminum hydroxide and calcium carbonate. Both of these are constipating antacids. So what we've done very quickly is said, "Okay, I've got two of the antacids: aluminum hydroxide, calcium carbonate, and then I've got three of the side effects: decreased phosphate with aluminum hydroxide and calcium carbonate, the deal with chelation with fluoroquinolones and tetracycline, and constipation from aluminum hydroxide and calcium carbonate." So instead of just this kind of random jumble of, "Okay, this is what I've got to remember. Please stay in my brain for the test," we've said, "Okay, this is exactly how I'm going to do it. This is the order I want my brain to hold on to this information." Now, I said we're going to need four and four, so we're going to take "meals" and take apart that "act on" mnemonic as well. So magnesium hydroxide, which is the brand Milk of Magnesia, another antacid, magnesium hydroxide causes a laxative effect. So we want to make sure to put that as well to contrast that calcium carbonate and aluminum hydroxide cause constipation. So an antacid doesn't always cause the same side effect; it depends on which one. And then sodium bicarbonate, it's in Alka-Seltzer. You would consider this also an antacid. So for this next one, we have "meals," M-E-A-L-S, to remember two more antacids and one more side effect. So now we have four antacids and four side effects in our brain. And we can say, "Okay, what are the four antacids? Aluminum hydroxide, calcium carbonate, magnesium hydroxide, sodium bicarb. What are the four side effects? Decreased phosphate with aluminum hydroxide and calcium carbonate, the deal with chelation with fluoroquinolones and tetracycline, and constipation from aluminum hydroxide and calcium carbonate." So instead of just this kind of random jumble of, "Okay, this is what I've got to remember. Please stay in my brain for the test," we've said, "Okay, this is exactly how I'm going to do it. This is the order I want my brain to hold on to this information." And I know it looks a little bit jumbled here, but your brain has no problem with that. You can just go back to it, and all your brain wants is order and organization. So you just hear the "A-C-I-D-I-C" for acidic, and you know two of the antacids, three of the side effects. And then you've got "meals," M-E-A-L-S, two antacids, one side effect, for a total of four antacids and four side effects in a very memorizable order. And you can come back to this. You can practice this. But this is just one of the 131 mnemonics that I put in there. Let me know in the comments if this method would be helpful. Again, I try to innovate, but that doesn't mean that I know if it works or not. So I'm curious to see if this is something that's helpful for you.

Like to learn more?

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

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

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

Here is the Link to my Pharmacy Residency Coursesresidency.teachable.com