Pharmacology Fundamentals: 99 Flashcards on Pharmacokinetics, Receptors and Drug Classes

Pharmacology exams rarely fail students on the drug names. They fail them on the concepts underneath: what a half-life actually measures, why gentamicin needs blood monitoring, how a partial agonist differs from an antagonist. The Pharmacology: Antibiotics, Antivirals & Analgesics/Psychiatric Drugs deck (code MQ3388, 99 cards) is built around those foundations: pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, drug development and the vocabulary of the field, with drug classes such as opioids, NSAIDs, antidepressants and antipsychotics introduced through their mechanisms.

Sample cards

Everything the deck defines

• Pharmacokinetics: liberation, absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, bioavailability, volume of distribution (VD), total clearance, area under the curve (AUC), first-pass metabolism, lipophilicity and the lipid bilayer, liver vs kidney roles.
• Pharmacodynamics: receptor binding, dose-response curves, therapeutic window, agonist, partial agonist, antagonist, efficacy, potency, EC50, binding affinity, therapeutic index (narrow vs wide), tolerance.
• Molecular targets: receptors, enzymes, membrane transport proteins; G protein coupled receptors, ligand-gated ion channels, receptor tyrosine kinases; enzyme inhibitors.
• Drug classes: opioids and morphine, NSAIDs, antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, MAO inhibitors, psychostimulants in ADHD, psychoplastogens.
• Drug development: lead compound, structure-activity relationship (SAR), analogues, stereochemistry, off-target activity, SPORCalc, the two FDA approval requirements, the one-in-5,000 success rate and the billion-dollar cost.
• Subfields: clinical pharmacology, toxicology, pharmacognosy, psychopharmacology, neuropharmacology, immunopharmacology, pharmacogenomics, pharmacogenetics, pharmacometabolomics, pharmacomicrobiomics, pharmacoepigenetics, pharmacovigilance, pharmacoepidemiology, environmental pharmacology.
• Clinical practice: adverse drug reactions, drug-drug interactions, therapeutic drug monitoring, placebo effect, personalized medicine, epigenetic therapy, organ bath and myograph experiments.

Two study rules for this deck

Sort every card into "drug on body" or "body on drug". That is the pharmacodynamics/pharmacokinetics split, and it is the single most tested distinction in introductory pharmacology. Half-life, clearance, VD, AUC, first-pass and P450 are the body acting on the drug; agonists, EC50, efficacy, potency and the therapeutic window are the drug acting on the body. Say the category before flipping each card until it is automatic.

Chain the potency cards together. EC50, potency, efficacy and therapeutic index are defined in relation to each other: a lower EC50 means higher potency; efficacy is the maximum response, not the dose; the therapeutic index compares the toxic dose to the effective dose. Review these four cards in sequence rather than shuffled, then test the aminoglycoside card as the practical example of a narrow index.

Pace

Ninety-nine cards fit into three sessions: pharmacokinetics first, pharmacodynamics and targets second, development, subfields and drug classes third, followed by a full shuffled pass. The definitions are short enough that a full review takes under fifteen minutes once the first pass is done.

The Pharmacology deck (code MQ3388) is available in the Flip It library at flip-it.app.