Olson. Clinical Pharmacology Made Ridiculously Simple

[Guest Ian Wong]

Clinical Pharmacology Made Ridiculously Simple. Olson, J. 2000. Medmaster, Inc. Miami.

 

ISBN: 0-940780-17-8

Chapters/Indigo.ca price: $29.95

Pages: 163

 

This is a very useful book and was my primary resource for Pharmacology information in Med 2. At UBC, Pharmacology has been decentralised into each organ-system block (eg. you learn your cardiovascular drugs while you are in your cardiovascular block). In the process of changing into our new curriculum, our current class receives less total hours of Pharmacology per week than previous classes did under the old curriculum. As a result, a number of the more paranoid among our class, myself being a prime example, decided to supplement our learning via outside textbooks. However, the important point was to find a textbook that was concise enough to be read while handling the hectic pace of med school. I think Olson's book delivers on that front.

 

Many of you might be wondering why I chose to do this outside reading, and whether this will apply to your own medical school experience. Here's my response. There's a lot of dreck taught in the first two years of medical school. In that time, you will encounter and be expected to learn a huge amount of nitpicky and clinically-irrelevant details. This might include being asked to distinguish between a slide of a parotid gland or a submandibular gland during Histology. Perhaps it will be trying to remember all the different congenital biochemical defects leading to glycogen storage disease (von Gierke's vs Pompe's vs McArdle's etc). You might be asked to describe function of a million and one cytokines.

 

While Pharmacology certainly has its share of minutiae, there is one undeniable fact. In virtually every specialty and area of medicine, you will be expected to have a strong grasp of pharmacology. If you send any amount of time working with a family physician, and look into their charts and prescribing habits, I'm betting that you'll see an awful lot of medications. Drug companies reap billion-dollar profits from the patients who use the medications that doctors prescribe and order.

 

For this reason, I view Pharmacology as being a subject that I want to retain. Unlike many of the above factoids, which were crammed and dumped the day after the examination, I think it's essential, especially at the stage where I am now, about to enter clinical medicine on the wards, to have a strong grasp of the drugs I will be encountering. By using this book throughout the year, I've retained a large amount of material, and I think this will come to good use during third year.

 

This book is very table intensive. It is separated into sections based on the organ-system that the drugs are trying to affect. For example, here are some of the sections you will find: Cardiovascular, Gastrointestinal, Antibiotics, Chemotherapy agents, etc. There is a short description of each class of drug inside that chapter (eg. in the Cardiovascular section, you will find a short summary of anti-thrombolytics, anti-arrythmics, anti-hypertensives, etc). A negative is that unlike many of the other books in the Ridiculously Simple series, this book has few mnemonics, and uses little to no humorous diagrams and stories, both of which I find help your learning and keep you interested in reading for longer periods. However, if you like making flashcards, the table format of this book makes it really easy to transcribe the relevant information onto cards.

 

Each table covers the drug, and then the following characteristics: Mechanism, Indications, Undesirable Effects, Pharmacokinetics, Contraindications, Drug Interactions, and Additional Notes. They do not give the dosages; you'll want to use a CPS for that (Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties). The past year, I've tended to focus on the mechanism of action, as well as the indications, in addition to learning both the generic, and trade name of the medication. I've discovered this to be of significant importance in my rural elective this summer. Here, doctors are very unpredictable as to which drug name they will use, and I've been working with doctors in Emerg, in the OR, and in their offices. For some drugs, they almost universally use the trade name (Effexor over venlafaxine, Paxil over paroxetine, Ativan over lorazepam), for other drugs they tend to alternate (Ancef or cefazolin, Keflex or cephalexin), and other drugs tend to use the generics (propofol over Diprivan, valproate over Depakene). The only conclusion is that you need to know both the trade and generic name for medications once you start doing clinical work.

 

As a result, you really need to know both names, and know them cold. Unfortunately, most, if not all Pharmacology books were written and directed towards a US audience, and some generic and trade names differ in between Canada and the States. A common example is the asthma medication with the trade name of Ventolin, which sells as a generic called salbutamol in Canada, but is named albuterol for the generic name in the US. The cardiac drug generic diltiazem has the trade names Cardizem and Tiazac, but I only see samples of Tiazac in my family doctor's office. A final, and less dramatic one which actually came up in the office as a point of confusion in the last two weeks is the topical steroid mometasone, which has the trade name Elocon in the US, but is sold as Elocom in Canada.

 

Since Ridiculously Simple is a American book, you can expect that a small number of the drugs will have different names than what you will encounter in Canada. However, for the most part, the names will be the same. The bottom line is that I think the additional time I spent reviewing this book, particularly the antibiotic section, has been extremely helpful during my rural elective. I expect this to continue in the future as I progress deeper into clinical medicine, and further into the prescription medication environment. This book will be very useful if you have both the time and motivation to use it regularly.