Pharmacology was by far the hardest subject of the 2nd year medical course in Cambridge. The content is massive, both in terms of background information and number of drugs to learn (over 300 compounds). Putting aside the painful and long process of working through all the material, I actually found pharmacology one of the most interesting topics of the year, and certainly very important in terms of preparing for the clinical years.
In terms of books to accompany the course, I absolutely recommend Rang&Dale’s Pharmacology – its 10th edition is relatively recent. I think this is one of the best textbooks I’ve ever read. It has a few great introductory chapters, and the more detailed content is excellently presented. It is extremely well written and well illustrated. I even used it to look up topics that came up in other subjects (for example Neurology). If you read the relevant chapters in Rang&Dale first, it will become much easier to read the Cambridge course handout, which was quite hard to digest at times.
Even though I did the course in 2011 (!), I left the resources on here, as some items have been downloaded more than 3000 times since, suggesting they are still relevant.
Aids for learning drugs
1. A spreadsheet allowing you to group the drugs in logical units
I found it a lot easier to learn the drugs as groups, rather than rote learn one drug at a time. In order not to have to learn a random collection of facts for each drug, I tried to categorise all available information in table format. It’s perhaps not the most graphically appealing, but I found it provided a good overview and starting point. You are welcome to download the spreadsheet and make any changes or add to it as you wish, given that it was created ages ago. The file is organised by lecture series, so it should be relatively easy to see if anything is no longer up to date. The spreadsheet used to come with separate vocabulary files that one could use to test oneself in a vocabulary app, but since this is no longer supported, I have not included it in this version of the website.
Here is the link to the spreadsheet:
2. Some overviews to learn groups of drugs: Inflammation, Antibiotics
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/overview-of-some-drugs-and-their-actions/16113135
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/c-riedinger-antibioticsbarestfacts/32306192