How To Study Pharmacology In Nursing School
In this instructional video, the presenter shares a step‑by‑step system for mastering pharmacology in nursing school. The core premise is to start every medication with its mechanism of action (MOA), using the MOA to logically predict side effects and the nursing assessments required for safe administration. She demonstrates the approach with morphine (an opioid agonist) and furosemide (a loop diuretic), showing how the MOA explains common adverse effects and vital signs to monitor. The video then expands the strategy: instead of memorizing each individual drug, students should group medications by drug class, learn the class MOA, and use name‑ending cues (e.g., “‑olol” for beta‑blockers) to identify class membership. The Davis Drug Guide is presented as the primary reference, with tips on navigating the class‑section (red binding) versus individual drug pages (white pages). To reinforce learning, the presenter advocates creating two types of medication cards – generic flash‑card style cards that list generic/brand name, class, MOA, contraindications, side effects, assessments, administration, and antidotes; and patient‑specific cards that add dose, route, timing, and infusion rates for instructor review. Throughout, she emphasizes critical thinking, self‑compassion, and the use of supplemental resources such as a free pharmacology cheat sheet, a paid “How to Study Pharmacology” course, and a series of videos on critical‑thinking in nursing. The tone is encouraging, practical, and slightly promotional, aiming to reduce study time and anxiety for nursing students.
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In this video, I'm going to show you how to study pharmacology and learn all of those medications faster in nursing school. These are the things that I did in nursing school that made studying pharm way easier. And I'll walk you through them step by step. I'm also going to give you some tips that I've never shared before here on YouTube, so stay tuned because nursing school is about to get a whole lot easier. Now hit that subscribe button and click the notification bell and let's started get do this. My number one tip for studying pharmacology that saved me a gazillion hours studying in nursing school is to learn the mechanism of action first. Every drug has a mechanism of action or an moa. This is a big fancy term for just how the drug acts in the body. What does it do? And don't worry, I'll walk you through an example in a minute to help this all sink in for you. So stay with me. Now, the thing about the mechanism of action that most nursing students don't realize is that it's the foundation for everything else that you need to know about the drug, namely the side effects and the nursing assessment. Since the mechanism of action of the drug tells you how it acts in the body, that will also give you a clue as to what the side effects might be as well as the things that you will need to assess. So let's head on over to my living room really quick and walk through an example to help this really sink in. Okay, so the first example I wanted to start with was morphine. So morphine. First off, Davis Drug Guide. You've got to get this book. It is so, so helpful, has all the information that you need for all your medications in nursing school and it just lays it out really, really nice and easy for you. So, so you can find what you need when you need it, which makes it very, very nice. So morphine is an opioid agonist. That's his class. And now you'll go down here to the action. So for every medication in the drug guide, you'll have a section where it says action. You see that action. So that's what it means by the mechanism of action, binds to opiate receptors in the cns, alters the perception of and response to painful stimuli while producing generalized CNS depression. Now that's the key here, that's really what I want you to grasp onto, is that morphine is a CNS depressant. So it's going to suppress the central nervous system when you know that as the mechanism of action for morphine. And then you come over here to side effects. They all make sense. I want you to focus on the underlined ones. So, so in the Davis Stroke Guide, we'll just kind of do an overview of how to use this. The underlined side effects are the most common ones that you would see. They're the most, you know, the most common ones. And then the red ones are the life threatening ones. So if the central nervous system is depressed, what would you expect? Well, your patient could become confused and sedated. That's the first two ones here. Confusion and sedation, hypotension because their blood pressure might drop because that central nervous system controls the patient's blood pressure. Your nervous system controls how the blood pressure responds. So hypotension could obviously be a side effect and constipation as well, because the GI tract, your entire body is innervated so much with nerves. So if you are depressing or suppressing that nervous system, then that pretty much your bowels are really going to kind of stall out and that's what causes that constipation. So really I want you to think of the mechanism of action being the cause of these side effects for the most part. So obviously if you are suppressing someone's neurological function, their CNS system, they're going to be confused and sedated and it could cause hypotension and constipation. Also the main red one here is a respiratory depression. Where is that respiratory depression? Now that is the life threatening one that's listed here for morphine and respiratory depression. Obviously for morphine, if you are suppressing someone's central nervous system, then their respirations, they might get lower and lower and lower, they could stop breathing. So that's what we mean by that. Now let's scroll over to the nursing assessment that you'll need to do. Now the main ones that I wanted to point out were assessing their level of consciousness, their blood pressure, their pulse and their respirations. This says before and then periodically during administration is what it says listed here. When you think about this, this all makes sense. If we are depressing someone's central nervous system like we said, with the side effects, it could cause their blood pressure to drop, can cause their heart rate to slow down, could cause constipation, their GI tract to kind of slow down, stall out, can cause their respirations to slow. So obviously if we are giving a medication that could cause those things to happen, then we would want to Assess their blood pressure, assess their heart rate, assess their respirations, assess their level of consciousness before we give that medication. That's how we give that safely. So I really want you to think as you're learning your medications, okay, what's the main mechanism of action? What does this medication do? What am I expecting from it? And then you can go over to your side effects and go over to your nursing assessment and the implications and think through it logically. Do those things make sense? And oftentimes they do. I do want to point out that sometimes there will be some random things that come up in, like the side effects of a drug. For example, let's scroll over here to furosemide. Furosemide is a loop diuretic. And let's read. Its mechanism of action inhibits the reabsorption of sodium and chloride from the loop of Henle and distal renal tubule. So, so it basically just gives out all the water from your body. It's gonna kick out all the water, and it's also going to increase renal excretion of water, sodium, chloride, magnesium, potassium and calcium. So all those electrolytes, it's really just gonna kick out water and electrolytes from the body. That's what it does. Now, over here in side effects, you will notice that tinnitus can be a pretty big side effect, furosemide. So tinnitus is ringing in the ears. And that is just a side effect of that medication that can happen and doesn't really have much to do with those, that mechanism of action of furosemide. So there are going to be things like that that do come up that you will need to know. But for the most part, it's just really, really helpful to know the mechanism of action and its relation to side effects and the nursing assessment, because for the most part, it's going to work that way. Now, let's just keep furosemide as another example. If we know that furosemide is going to kick out so much water and electrolytes from the patient's body. Now we see over here in the side effects, it's the same thing. All those underlined, all these underlined side effects here, dehydration, hypocalcemia, hypochloremia, hypokalemia, hypo, all the things for electrolytes, because it's going to get rid of all those electrolytes. So you would expect those electrolytes to decrease in the body and become hypo. So hypocalcemia, hypomagnesemia, hyponatremia hypo, all of the things, and then dehydration, of course, because it's going to get rid of water as well. So critically think about it through that lens. Then when we scroll over to the nursing assessment for furosemide, the the first thing you'll see is assess fluid status. You'll need to monitor their weight, their intake and output, make sure that you're not getting rid of too much fluid and their fluid balance isn't going super wonky or super crazy. So you've got to assess those things, blood pressure and pulse, before and during administration. Because if you're going to get rid of all of that fluid from a patient, you can expect their blood pressure to drop, their pulse possibly to decrease or increase depending on what's going on. So those, those things can really fluctuate with this medication simply because you are getting rid of so much water and so many electrolytes. So as you look at the mechanism of action for your medications, really start to think about how that relates to the side effects of the medications and the nursing assessment that you'll need to do for it. And the more practice you get at this, the better you will get. Do not worry, friend. Trust yourself. I know it can be hard in the beginning to really think critically about it, but the more practice you get, the better you will get at it. So I hope that now I've convinced you that learning the mechanism of action of a medication first is the best way to go. That way you don't need to heavily memorize the side effects in nursing assessment points for the drug. You can just use your awesome critical thinking skills and walk through it logically. If the drug does this in the body, then it makes sense that the effects would be these things, and then you'll need to assess for these things. Trust yourself, friend. You know more than you think you do. Nursing school, as you've heard, is not about memorizing a bunch of facts. It's about actually applying the information that you're learning, which is exactly what we're doing here. The more you practice this process and your critical thinking skills in nursing school, the better you will get at it. So do not give up. You can do this. If you want more videos on how to critically think in nursing school, be sure to check these videos out right here where I walk you through how to critically think step by step. It always really bugs me how we were expected to think critically in nursing school, but no one ever tells you what that means. So I walk you through how to do it here in those videos. You're welcome. So. So now that I've convinced you that you need to learn the mechanism of action first, now I'm going to throw a little bit of a curveball at you and tell you that that's not the full story. But don't worry, this is super good news. Focus on learning the mechanism of action for the drug class, not for each individual drug. Boom. Mic drop. This is the number one mistake that I see nursing students make when they're studying pharmacology. They try to memorize all of the individual medications that they need to learn. There are things thousands of medications, friend, and you are expecting yourself to know them all by the end of your term. No, no, no, no, no. That is not going to happen. So here's the better way to do it. That will save you hours of study time. Group your medications by their drug class and then learn the mechanism of action for that drug class, not for the individual drugs. A drug class is just a group of drugs that with the same or similar mechanism of action, meaning that all of those drugs inside a drug class act similar in the body. So don't waste your time memorizing it. For each individual medication. Focus on learning the mechanism of action for the drug class and also knowing what drugs belong to each drug class. And to make this even easier for you, I have a free pharmacology cheat sheet for you that walks you through some common medication endings and then which drug class they belong to. The link is in the description for you to get it. Did you know that the endings of a medication name can tell you what drug class it belongs to? It's a super cool nursing school hack. For example, atenolol, besoprol, metoprolol and propranolol all end in olol. Those are all beta blockers. So lucky for you, Instead of memorizing the mechanism of action for each of those medications individually, you can just look up the mechanism of action for the drug class of beta blockers and then you'll automatically know how each of those drugs acts in the body. If you're a nursing SOS member, make sure to head on over to your member dashboard and click on the how to Study Pharmacology course in there. Because I walk you through this process there for you step by step in more detail. And if you're not a member, what are you doing with your life? I will put a link link in the description for you to sign up for the wait list. That way you'll be the first to know when enrollment opens again. So this pharmacology hack is seriously amazing. And I don't want to just tell you what to do. I want to actually show you. So let's head on over to my living room again and I'll walk you through how to do this. But before we head on over there, I want to give a shout out to EMMA for our YouTube comment of the week. Emma said thank you. You really broke down the nursing process down to my understanding. Thank you. I am so glad you loved the video, Emma, and thanks for your sweet comment, friend. Of course, Keep those comments coming. They really do help me to know what videos you like and what you want to see more of here on this channel. So feel free to post your video requests in the comments below and I will check them out. So. So now let's go over to my living room and I can show you how to break up your medications by drug class. So again, for this one, you will pull out your trusty Davis drug guide. And as you are learning your medications, all these white pages here in the drug guide are each of the individual medications. Now, I have a lot of tabs here that I tabbed during nursing school for all, like, the most common medications that I would look up. That's a really great way to do it. So you can just like, quick, quickly flip through to whatever page you need. That just made it super easy. So that's a little handy tip for you. But all these white pages, the whole white section are the individual medications. Now if you go to this red binding here in the front, that is all your drug classes, all the classifications, this is classifications on the side. So let's go, go to, let's find beta blockers because that's always a fun drug class to deal with. So when you go to one of these drug classes, you'll find that it has a lot of information for it. But the one that I want you to focus on is where it says general action and information, top general action and information. And that is going to tell you what the mechanism of action is for the drug class. So you'll read through that section here and then it will also say some general nursing assessment points as well for all of the medications in the drug class. Like we said with our beta blockers, all of those beta blockers in that drug class, Medoprolol, Probanolol, all the olols, those all will have the same or similar mechanism of action. And you can just find it right there. And of course, if you would like, you could double check with the individual medications in, you know, the white section here. Just find it, pull up that page and check it out if you need more information. But that is a great way to learn your medications faster is to just look at the drug class, the classification section in your Davis drug guide. So that is how to divide up your medications by drug class and learn the mechanism of action for the drug class. Now, the next part of learning medications faster in nursing school is creating med cards. Med cards have two main types in nursing school. Ones that you need to turn into your instructor. These are often more specific to one patient. And then the med cards that you create just for yourself, kind of like a flashcard. Now, the best news I have for you is that you really will learn a lot of medications as you go through nursing school. You are not expected to know all of them your first term, even though it seems like it sometimes. And of course, you absolutely must research the medications and how to give them safely before you give them to a patient. The more you take care of your patients and research their medications, the more meds you're going to learn and commit to memory over time. So give yourself grace through this whole process. It doesn't happen overnight. It, it takes time. But one of the best ways to speed this process up is to create med cards for you to reference. I know there's a lot of them that you can buy online and those are great as a quick reference, but honestly, I don't recommend them. When you're just starting out and learning your medications. I really recommend that you write them out yourself because you'll remember it faster that way. Just the act of writing out all that information down, you will be super surprised at how much you learn. Now let's go to my whiteboard and I'm going to show you how to do this. So making med cards does not need to be super complicated or tough in nursing school. You just need to write out the basic information for each medication. You are not in pharmacy school. You do not need to know all of the things about your medications. You just need to know how to give it safely. You have to know these things, how to assess a patient. You know, what does the drug do, the contraindications, the side effects. You need to know these things in order to take care of your patients safely. So this is what we're going to go over. You'll need to know the generic and the brand name of the drug, the pharmacologic and the therapeutic class, the mechanism of action, the contraindications, now contraindications means if a patient has a certain disease, disorder, something's going on with them that you don't want to give this drug with. So pregnancy is often a very common example. A lot of and kidney disease. So a lot of drugs should not be given during pregnancy or a lot of drugs shouldn't be given with renal failure. Kidney disease, if the drug is like 90% or 100% of it is excreted by the kidneys, then if the patient's in renal failure, it would just build up to toxic levels in the body. So in that case you could see some drugs that have a contraindication of renal failure because for that reason if the patient's in renal failure, their body just can't excrete that drug. So it can build up to toxic levels in the body. So that's a really common one you might see. Same thing with pregnancy. Like we mentioned side effects. You'll want to know the most common and life threatening ones, which we just went over a little bit ago. The most common ones will be underlined in your Davis drug guide. The life threatening ones will be highlighted in red. Then the nursing assessment. Of course you have to know what to assess for before, during and after you give a medication. Super, super important to give it safely. And then administration the key points of giving the medication, is it a PO med, is it an oral med, is it an iv, is it, you know, if it's an iv, what rate do you need to flow it at? What if it's an IV push? How long do you need to push that medication through? You know, oftentimes medications need to take a little bit to kind of absorb in the body so you don't want to push it too fast. So, so that is kind of the basic there. You can also include the antidote for some medications. Some medications it's important to know the antidote. So you can add that here as well. Now these things, here are the key things that you need to know for generic med cards. If you are creating a flashcard, this is what you would want to include. If it's just a generic flashcard for your reference or your information. Now if you are going to hand this into an instructor, you are going to want to include more patient specific information for that medication and that would include basically how you're going to give it. It's more of the administration, the dose, the route, the time, all of those administration points. Like I said, if it's an iv, what's the floor flow? Right? All those things that you would need to be patient specific but for that you would need to know that particular patient's dose and the time that they get it. All of those things. So those are the two different types of med cards that you'll commonly do in nursing school, the generic ones that you'll do for flashcards which would include all this information and then the more patient specific ones that would include all of it. So I hope that helps. In the next video in this series I'm going to walk you through how to study for your final exams the easy way. Seriously friend, do not miss this video. I'm going to save you so much stress when finals come around and make sure to get your free pharmacology cheat sheet. The link is down below in the description. Now click on one of these videos right over here so you can keep rocking nursing school and go become the nurse that God created only you to be. And I'll see you in the next video my friend. Take care.
