Studying pharmacy, midwifery, dentistry, physiotherapy and nursing

Whether you are in pharmacy, midwifery (maïeutique), dentistry (odontologie), physiotherapy, a nursing school (IFSI, France's nursing training institutes) or another allied health program, you run into the same three difficulties:

• Long lists of similar items: drug classes, molecule names that look alike, side effects.
• Numbers that leave no room for error: dosages, maximum doses, lab reference ranges, dose calculations.
• A lot of visual material: anatomy, X-rays, dental charts, clinical procedures.

Each of these difficulties calls for a different type of card. That is the key to this page.

With image occlusion. You take a diagram (a cross-section of the knee, the muscles of the forearm, a dental arch), you hide one label, and you have to recall it. Each mask becomes a separate card that comes back at its own pace.

Concrete examples:

• Physiotherapy: the rotator cuff muscles on a posterior view of the shoulder, with their insertion and innervation on the back.
• Dentistry: a full dental arch whose tooth numbers you hide one by one.
• Midwifery: a diagram of the pelvis and its diameters.
• Nursing school: the main structures of the heart and the path of blood flow.

Hide only one structure at a time. A card that hides ten labels at once becomes impossible to grade honestly.

With cloze deletion. It lets you keep the whole sentence, with its context, while asking for only one element at a time.

• “Paracetamol is a WHO step [1] analgesic.” One blank, one answer.
• “Antidote for paracetamol poisoning: [N-acetylcysteine].”
• “ACE inhibitors block the conversion of angiotensin I into [angiotensin II].”

For dosages, make one card per dose, not one card per drug. And check every number against your course or the reference your instructors give you: a wrong card is learned just as well as a right one. Our advice on making good flashcards fully applies here.

Dose calculation is not memorized, it is practiced. Cards help you retain the basics (unit conversions, the formula for an infusion flow rate), then regular exercises do the rest.

A simple method: a short set of timed exercises every week, corrected right away. Each reasoning mistake becomes a “trap” card: for example the conversion between milligrams and micrograms. See also our guide on active recall and self-testing.

The trap in pharmacology is to learn one class, move on to the next, and have forgotten everything by exam time. Spaced repetition solves this problem: each card comes back at increasing intervals, just before it would be forgotten. Research on the spacing effect (Cepeda et al., 2006) points the same way.

Organize your decks like your curriculum: one deck per teaching unit, or per system (cardiology, neurology, infectious diseases). When an exam approaches, you review the relevant decks together. More details on spaced repetition.

During a placement, write down every evening what you saw and did not understand: an unfamiliar drug, a specific monitoring protocol, a lab value. Turn it into two or three cards that same evening. That way you learn what is actually useful in the field, not only what comes up on the exam.

For case studies and MCQs, practice under real conditions, stopwatch in hand, then go back over every mistake. Our guide to practicing multiple-choice questions explains the method in detail.

Mnemesia brings your courses and your cards together in a single app, free, with no account and offline. It is developed by Raphaël, engineer and medical student.

• Import your courses as PDFs and crop a diagram straight from the handout to make an image occlusion card.
• Write your cloze deletions as in Anki, and your dose calculation formulas neatly formatted.
• Let FSRS schedule your reviews, with a retention target you set yourself.
• Before an exam, review several decks together, then take a self-test graded out of 20 that does not disturb your schedule.
• Share your decks with your class as a single file, images included.

Mnemesia runs on Mac, iPad, Windows, Linux and Android tablets. Download it and import your first courses in a few minutes.