Step I Pharm Issues

[lindyloohoo]

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Ok, so after seeing people posting about pharm on their tests, I'm gettin a little scared. I can't stand reading FA pharm anymore. It's just blah, blah, blah at this point. I'm averaging 70% on q-bank in pharm and on the NBME form 1, my bar is at the top (with the asterisk). Everything indicates I should probably be ok. The only thing is, I haven't studied pharm AT ALL whild studying for boards. I learned from questions and my once over of the FA pharm. (Our curriculum does pharm all year, so maybe that's helped.)

From you guys who have taken the test, are the questions more physio based (I'll have you know that my qbank score in that is 55%) or is it regurgitate what you know, IE, vanco is for gram pos only with the red man side effects.

I guess I'm just looking for someone to say, dude, that's low, get your butt in gear, or dude, stop your b*tching and move on to raising that physio score.

Thanks for listening, ya'll.

 

[bigfrank]

If you have First Aid memorized, you'll be fine. All the questions my friends and I got centered around interactions, MOA, and toxicities. High Yield Stuff.

Finally, my test had 6-10 pharmacokinetics questions (competitive vs. non-competitive agonists, potency, half-life, efficacy, etc.), all of which was sufficiently represented in First Aid.

 

[trouta]

I felt like most of the pharm questions I had were regurgitate what you know... mostly info from First Aid. The pharm questions that I had trouble with werent covered in First Aid or High Yield Pharmacology so I dont know where I was supposed to get that info from.

70% in pharm is pretty good. I think you will be OK if you know the basics about most things.

 

[Stinger86]

If you feel like you know pharmacology, then don't study it anymore. That's great that you had pharm for a whole year... we only had pathophysiology for a year, which was cool because I didn't have to spend a lot of time reviewing it for the boards. That way I could spend extra time going over first year topics that I flushed long ago.

The majority of my step questions came right from First Aid, but if you want to get nearly all of them right, you're going to have to pull out little details you learned from your course. And since you have an advantage there, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

There usually won't be a lot of questions on pharmacokinetics, but it's always useful to know all about antagonism, signal transduction and pathways , tolerance, and the important equations for clearance, dosage, half-life, etc. Make sure you really know signal transduction too. Unfortunately there's a lot of variability in representation of these subjects across different students' exams

I felt the trickiest pharm questions involved a given scenario and then they would ask you "why did this happen", so you had to apply concepts rather than just regurgitate MOAs, toxicities, etc.

Good luck!

 

[lindyloohoo]

Thanks for the replies and input. I felt good about pharm, which I think is why I didn't study it much. I think I just freaked out listening to other people who had put in a ton of time. I think I got really luck studying because our curriculum is everything over a whole year (systems based). I'm having a tough time with stuff from first year, however. I can't imagine what position I'd be in if we had real "classes" with pharm as a block, path as a block...I think I'd be in a world of hurt!

Back to cramming everything into my head for Thursday!! I can't wait to get this over with. I envy you all 🙂

 

[bigfrank]

Yea, it's a good idea to have first aid memorized regardless of your exam in pharm. I, for example, had 7-10 Q's on pharmacokinetics and First Aid prepared me well.