My #1 Pharmacology HACK for Nursing School
In this instructional video, the presenter shares a streamlined approach to mastering pharmacology for nursing school. She outlines the four essential categories nurses must know for each medication—pathophysiology (mechanism of action), signs and symptoms (side effects), nursing assessment, and nursing interventions—and emphasizes that the mechanism of action should be the primary focus of study. By grouping individual drugs into their respective drug classes, students can learn a single mechanism of action and apply it to all drugs within that class, dramatically reducing the amount of rote memorization required. The presenter demonstrates the method with two concrete examples: beta‑blockers (atenolol and metoprolol) and opioid analgesics (morphine and hydrocodone), showing how the class‑level mechanism, side‑effects, assessments, and interventions are identical across drugs. She recommends the Davis Drug Guide as a core reference for locating drug classes and provides a free cheat sheet that lists common drug‑class name endings to aid rapid identification. Throughout, she encourages viewers to engage with the channel, but the core takeaway is a practical, class‑based study hack that saves time and improves retention for nursing pharmacology.
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Hey there, friend. In this video, I'm going to show you how to cut your studying time down when you're studying pharmacology and save a gazillion hours studying all of those medications that you've got to know for nursing school. So before we get started, make sure you write love in the comments below and hit that like button to let me know that you love this video. And of course, subscribe and hit the bell so you never miss any other video that I've got for you to give you nursing school tips and tricks to help you raise your grades and have more free time in nursing school. Now let's do it. Now, if you've been around for a little while, you know that there are four main things that you have to know for nursing school. So these are really the four main categories that we teach here on this channel and that I teach inside the nursing SOS membership community. It's what this, how we structure everything, pretty much everything that we do. So those four things are pathophysiology, signs and symptoms, nursing assessment, and nursing interventions. So those are the four main things that you need to know about for nursing school, for what you're learning now. This is true as well for pharmacology. So when you're studying pharmacology in nursing school, you have to know those four main categories. Now let's talk about them. Pathophysiology, which is the mechanism of action of the medication, the drug. Then signs and symptoms, which is the side effects of that drug, the signs and symptoms that your patient's going to present with. Then the nursing assessment, what you need to assess for when you give that medication. So before you give that medication, during the medication administration and then after the patient receives that medication, what do you have to assess for? And then the nursing interventions that need to be done around that medication. So those are the four main things that you've got to focus on when you study pharmacology in nursing school. Now, I have two things that are really going to blow your mind. The first one is that you need to focus on studying the mechanism of action the most. Now, the mechanism of action, otherwise called the moa, you may have heard it called that before, just moa, mechanism of action. That just means that it's how the drug is acting in the body. So when you give a medication to a patient, what is that drug doing inside the body to give those effects? Now you have to focus on the mechanism of action for, for the drug. Because then the other three categories, the side effects the signs and symptoms, the nursing assessment and nursing interventions will stem from that mechanism of action. So this is amazing because you can focus on learning that mechanism of action for the drug and then you will automatically know the signs and symptoms, the nursing assessment and nursing interventions. So when you're learning your medications, I want you to focus on studying the mechanism of action for, for the drugs. Now this is because everything else kind of stems from that. When you understand the mechanism of action, what's happening with the medication in the patient's body, that it's so much easier to learn side effects, the nursing assessment and nursing interventions. And I'm going to walk you through a couple examples a little bit later and we'll get to that. So I will break it all down super easy for you and let you know what I mean by this. But here's the golden nugget right here that I really, really want you to know. This is the number one pharmacology hack that I've got for you that is just going to be completely game changing for you. There is something called a medication class, a class of drugs. This means that it is a whole group of individual medications that have the same or similar mechanism of action. So like we said, the mechanism of action is really what you need to be focusing on the most. The mechanism of action, how the drug is acting in the body. And now I'm telling you that, that there is something called a drug class that groups individual medications by their mechanism of action. So there's this whole class like different classes of drugs that have the same or similar mechanism of action. And here is why this is so, so important for you to know and entirely game changing for you in nursing school. Instead of learning each individual drug's mechanism of action, everything you need to know about it, focus on learning about that drug class. So the class of drugs, mechanism of action, focus on the drug class and then you will automatically know the mechanism of action of all of the individual medications that fall into that drug class. This is completely game changing in nursing school because instead of memorizing a gazillion individual medications, like there are tons of tons of them, I know you've got tons on your list, focus on grouping them into their drug class and then learning the mechanism of action and everything you've got to know about that drug class and then you will automatically know all of the mechanism of actions of those individual drugs because when they fall into that drug class, they have the same or similar mechanism of action. So we want to show you what I mean by this. So I've got my Davis drug guide here. This is the book that I really, really recommend. If you do not have it already, if you definitely get it for nursing school, this is really a fantastic resource for you because it has all the individual drugs, all the drug classes that you need to learn about for nursing school. And it really breaks it down super, super simple. So definitely snag this if you think it'll be helpful for you if you don't have it already. Oh, my gosh. It's good. It's just going to help you out so much. So this is the book I use. This is an older edition, so if you get the new one, the COVID might look a little bit different. This is the 14th edition, and I do believe that they've updated, if not a couple of times since I've had it. So I am going to look up a couple medications for you, and I want to show you how this works practically. So I'm gonna show you the drug classifications where you flip in your Davis drug guide. In the beginning here, if you see the spine of the book, see there's this red section here, this red tab section says classifications. You read that. Classifications. So all the classes of drugs will be here. And so this is really where I recommend that you kind of start with your drug guide is to flip through this and look at all the classifications of medications, because this is going to show you those groups of drugs, the classes of drugs, and what you need to know about the classes. And then as you get through all these kind of tab sections that I tabbed in nursing school, these are all the individual medications, all these kind of white pages here. So the first drug class that I want to talk about is beta blockers. I don't know if you can read that down there. I hope you can. Beta blockers. And so the two that I am going to talk about are atenolol and metoprolol. So what beta blockers are gonna do is they're gonna slow down the heart rate, they're going to bind to beta adrenergic receptors in the heart, and then so slow down the cardiac system, slow down the heart rate. And that will do a whole bunch of things. So let's talk about atenolol and metoprolol. So atenolol and metoprolol, because they fall into this class of beta blockers, they will both have the same or similar mechanism of action. So this is why I say it's so, so important to memorize the. Instead of memorizing the individual medication, memorize the drug class, which is beta blockers. So when you come back here to beta blockers in your drug classification in the drug guide, Davis drug guide, it will say beta blockers down here. And on the next page it actually has the what we're looking for, general action and information. You can see that. So beta blockers, it'll tell you exactly what I just told you is that they bind to beta adrenergic receptors. And so that's what beta blockers does do. And then you come over to a tunnell here and you know, just to verify it's the same thing, blocks the stimulation of beta adrenergic receptors. That's straight from the Davis drug guide here. So with this, and I'm going to flip to metoprolol as well to show you why this is so stinking important, is because now instead of having to memorize the mechanism of action for each individual beta blocker, you can just memorize it for the drug class. And this gets really, really exciting when you have to memorize the adverse reactions and side effects. That's a whole section in the drug guide, adverse reactions and side effects. But you will notice now, especially with these two medications that I am pointing out, Metoprolol and Atenolol, because they are both beta blockers. They, their adverse reactions and side effects are almost identical. They're almost exactly the same. And in particularly the ones that you need to know, like fatigue, weakness, Fatigue and weakness, they're exactly the same, like the first two ones that are underlined. And there it is for atenolol, fatigue and weakness. Obviously, if you give a beta blocker and you're slowing the heart rate down, you can expect your patient to have fatigue and weakness. You know that that is definitely a definite possibility. So instead of learning each individual medication's adverse reaction or side effects and signs and symptoms that you've got to look for, you can just memorize the ones for the drug class rather than having to learn each individual medication and spending a gazillion hours focused on each individual medication when it's the same for the drug class anyway. The same thing goes for the nursing assessment. You obviously, before you give a beta blocker, if you're gonna slow their heart rate down, you need to check their blood pressure and their heart rate. Come on. So that's gonna be the same thing for those beta blockers, Atenolol and metoprolol. Now let's take another example. I wanna talk about opioid analgesics. So morphine and hydrocordone. So morphine and hydrocodone are both opioid agonists. So this means that they're binding to receptors in the central nervous system and they are going to create that experience. The perception, perception was the word that I was looking for. The perception of pain relief. So the person is going to perceive pain differently. So when given morphine or hydrocodone, those drugs are going to bind to the central nervous system receptors and then kind of block that pain. So block the perception of pain. And so you can see in the action here, I hope you look it up in your Davis drug. Add at home and. But it'll be the same thing. The action for hydrocodone and then the action for morphine is the same thing binding to those central nervous system receptors. Now let's look at the adverse reactions or side effects. So for hydrocodone here, first, confusion, dizziness and sedation are the first three that you need to know about. And tada over in morphine, Confusion, sedation, dizziness are the first three. So this is why you guys, I am telling you, I am telling you it's so important to remember the drugs by class because they're the same thing. The mechanism of action is going to be the same or similar for all of the medications inside a drug class. So it makes no sense whatsoever to memorize individual medications like this. When you can just look at the drug class here in the front of your Davis drug guide and memorize it that way. This is going to save you a ton of time in nursing school. School. I really do not want you to stress about pharmacology anymore. It does not need to be as hard as you think it is, friend. It should not take you a gazillion hours to remember all these medications. Of course, as you get more practice with them at clinical, you will also learn so. So much so as you're studying, try to focus on the mechanism of action of the drug class and then you will be able to understand all those other parts of each individual medication. Because if you already know each the mechanism of action for the drug class, then you automatically know the mechanism of action for each individual drug that's a part of that class. Now we do have a free pharmacology cheat sheet to give to you. So I listed out the endings of pharmacology pharmacologic classes. So the drug classes, a lot of the medications that are inside particular drug classes have the same or similar endings. So like we had our example earlier was Metoprolol and Atenolol are both beta blockers, so beta blockers often have that ending to the drug name of Olol. So Metoprolol and Atenolol and all the other ones. So you will often see that that is true for a lot of the drug classes. So I do have a whole cheat sheet for you to help you with that. There's a lot of them so I wanted to get give you a cheat sheet to help you walk through all of that and learn all of those faster. So I will put that link down below in the description for you to snag it if you think that would be helpful for you. And I hope this video helped you out. Let me know in the comments below. If it did, I would love to hear from you. Write love in the comments below, let me know how it went. And of course make sure you subscribe to this channel and click the little bell so you never miss a video that we post here on this channel. Now go become the nurse that God created only you to be friend and I will catch you in the next video. Thank you so much for watching. I'll catch you later. Bye bye.
