David Miller, University of Glasgow

As used by Dr Foreman in House MD to brush up on his prescribing following encephalitis!!! This handy box of colour coded flashcard are something a little different to add to your armament of study tools. They detail the pronunciation, trade name (American trade name as some are different in the UK), class of drug, indications and uses, mechanism of action, side effect profile, interactions and any special considerations. The drugs included are all common so you wont find yourself wasting time on the minutiae of specialist drugs (the only drugs I wasn’t too familiar with when I started using the cards was the chemotherapy agents). There ideal for some light bedtime reading. Something different from trawling through another book, simply set yourself a target of completing say all the cardiovascular drugs and flick through them in bed. You’d easily get through the set in a couple of weeks but there the kind of thing you need to continuously keep upto date if you want to remember the specific side effect profile of every drug or remember the special considerations for drugs. A handy addition at the bottom of each card is a list of similar drugs and I found this really useful as when learning drugs I tend to initially know one drug from each class well and from that I can derive information about other drugs in the class and simply learn any notable differences. Finally there are some overview of a class cards which occur at the beginning of the section and have an illustration (usually of site and mechanism of action) to help ground your thinking before getting into the individual pharmacological classes. These cards are useful for anyone in 3rd year up probably to membership examinations. There good value for money considering what you get.

Posted 11th Mar 2010