Every time I try to write about the Roman Room / Memory Palace, the information becomes obsolete. As of December 22nd, I reached the milestone of memorizing 100 of the ClinCalc Top 300 Drugs of 2020. As of January 15th, I’m at 215 in total memorized! I forecast I’ll be at 300 by the middle of February! The discovery of this memorization technique is by far the most significant academic discovery of my career.
I was able to fit 100 items inside my house, 15 in my car, and 35 in my yard. Once I hit 150, I experimented with reusing locations for the next 10, using the original locations from 1-10. The idea was I could just reuse 150 locations rather than create 150 new ones. I decided to abandon this strategy, as using existing locations was actually slower. It was less fun as well because as I continue the journey to 300, it’s fun to ask “Okay, where am I going next?” I’m now using my neighbor’s houses, placing 5-10 items in each.
The benefit of using a location that I see every day is that my mind just quizzes itself. Every time I take a shower, for example, I’m standing in Insulin Lispro / Humalog, and then I go through the other four medications I have planted in the bathroom. I’m starting to get better at recognizing suffixes as well, such as -ipine for calcium channel blockers, and -sartan for angiotensin II receptor blockers.
The technique is working incredibly well; I’ve already recalled several medications in real time in the ER to help nurses or patients. It’s made the project worth it already.
There was a minor hiccup because I was using the 2019 list and the 2020 list just launched and the orders changed, but I’ve created a hybrid list of sorts and can now match the 2020 list. I won’t lie, the process is definitely time consuming, but I mean, memorizing anything is time consuming. A lot of the lists and things I’ve memorized in the past rely on groups, for example to memorize the presidents I really need to list all of them and see where the holes are. I’ve built mnemonics into “runs” of presidents. With the memory palace, however, each individual medication can be recalled on its own within seconds. It’s pretty powerful stuff.
What I noticed also is that the mnemonics are like a scaffolding and fade away over time. One word instantly transports me to a location and the other word is sitting there waiting for me. The crazy and insane mnemonics die off after a while, which is fine. As that scaffolding folds, I can feel the information being cemented into my long-term memory.
The other thing I did, was to create a Quizlet. As I master another 5-10 medications, I add them to the Quizlet, so I can study the list out of order. The other day at work I asked a friend to quiz me. As I recited a list of 150 from memory, some of the nearby nurses took notice and said they were quite impressed. This actually inspired me to push toward 300. The other day, I ran through the deck, which then had 200, and got nearly all of them. What was especially cool was at 199, I could actually cycle through the entire memory palace and I knew that 200 was Sitagliptin / Januvia because I hadn’t done that one yet. That was a cool moment.
I’m not the first to attempt this. I actually found a video of a pharmacy student talking about how she learned the Top 300. Her strategy was just to use flashcards… rote memorization. What I’m learning is that flashcards are really only for short term memory. You need to intentionally store information somewhere. Flashcards just help with recall of that information.
I’m also learning a ton about the health of the entire country; this list is a snapshot, well probably more like a collage of the health of the entire population. My observations are as follows:
Our blood pressure is through the roof
We’re all very sad and anxious
A lot of us have asthma
A lot of us have diabetes
I say this because almost every other medication is to reduce blood pressure in some way, either as an ACE inhibitor (Lisinopril), calcium channel blocker (Amlodipine, Diltiazem, Nifedipine), diuretic (HCT, Furosemide), Angiotensin II receptor blocker (Losartan, Valsartan, Irbesartan), or a beta blocker (Metoprolol, Carvedolol, Labetalol). There are some other interesting ones like Clonidine which affects the nervous system and even combinations like HCT+ Lisinopril (Zestoretic) and HCT+Losartan (Hyzaar).
There are also too many antidepressants to count including SSRIs, SNRIs, NDRIs, and SARIs.
After the first 150, new medications started to emerge. New to the list are glaucoma medications (Timolol / Blocadren) medications for Crohn’s Disease (Mesalamine / Pentasa) and antifungals (Ketoconazole / Nizoral) to name a few.
So the goal now is to push to 300. I’m also trying to expand a bit, classifying the diuretics by type (loop, thiazide) for example or the antibiotics (macrolide, beta-lactam, etc.) or the insulins (fast-acting, long-acting). I’ll make a post when I hit 300!