Drugs and Bugs?

[mdeast]

I'm terrible at them. We don't have a formal pharmacology or really microbiology course at our medical school (it's integrated into the organ blocks, but always de-emphasized and not taught well). I feel like I'm good at Path/Pathophysiology/Physiology questions, but these bug and drugs questions are KILLING me.

What's the best way to learn them? Flashcards? Tables? etc. Need the best resource/advice.

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[shan564]

How much time do you have?

I had poor pharm teaching at my school too, so I went through all of the Kaplan videos during 2nd year, and now I think pharm is my #1 subject in Kaplan/UW questions.

My micro teaching was also practically nonexistent, but I haven't figured out a good way to make up for that yet... I think I'll just add it to my cram list for the days before the test.

 

[mdeast]

Is it possible to just get the Pharm videos somewhere? How long are they?

 

[shan564]

Is it possible to just get the Pharm videos somewhere? How long are they?

Of course it's "possible" to find them online, but I'm not sure if there's a legal way to do it...

If I remember correctly, it was about 40ish hours... but I don't have the videos on my hard drive anymore, so I could be misremembering. I went through them with a study group, and after every section, we'd go through the Kaplan textbook and FA and then make a summary of all of the new drugs we learned on a big whiteboard. All in all, it took us about 1.5-2 months at about 2 hours a day.

There's also this:
http://www.doctorsintraining.com/pharmacology
I haven't tried it myself, but it seems pretty useful.

 

[Ronin786]

As far as I've heard FA and UWorld is enough for pharma and micro. You could try Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple for Micro. Its a quick read and very easy to retain the info in there.

 

[jatt12]

Get cmmrs and just go over tables in each chapter and add supplemental info in first aid with uworld,don't bother with Kaplan it is too long.

 

[sanityonleave]

I personally love Bugcards -- http://www.amazon.com/Bugcards-Complete-Microbiology-Review-Boards/dp/0967165539. They're very detailed, and you can just schlep them around whenever you're not sitting down studying and review them when you have time and you'll retain quite a bit.

YMMV, but they were a lifesaver for me for micro when we had it during 1st year and they've been really helpful for Step 1 studying also.