How to Master Drug Names

I am not the person to teach pharmacology, but I believe I can help you become comfortable enough with drug names so that encountering them will not draw focus from larger tasks at hand. Drug in this case, will be used to mean medicine.

Two ways to facilitate drug-name mastery involve listening to online videos and practicing with slideshow apps. Videos have the the benefit of demonstrating common pronunciation along with providing drug details such as indications for use and classes of action, but videos can be hard to practice with. Apps allow for much more steady, intense, and varied verbal exercise.

YouTube Prescription Drug Links

Here are a few video links that seem to be respectable:

Amboangel Drug-name Apps

The data in the following apps are derived from a 2024 Veterans Health Administration drug formulary. One could safely assume that it is a close representation of the most common drugs that an EHP could expect to encounter.

Items in the formulary that the average person would not classify as drugs, such as bandages, catheters, and condoms have been removed. Spaces have been added between slashes for reading convenience. Capitalization rules seem to vary and might not be correct in the database. Most names are generic.

START buttons also functions as PAUSE buttons. STOP buttons randomize and reload data and reset the counters. Words are intended to be read aloud.

A Bonus Benefit

Nothing in these apps is intended to be comprehensive. Where I am licensed, an EMT is permitted to administer or help to administer less than about a half dozen drugs and needs to know a little about a dozen more. It has been estimated that there are hundreds of thousands of known drugs in the world.

The apps on this page should help you learn to pronounce the names of some of the most common drugs. With practice, they should also help you develop the confidence to pronounce unfamiliar words whether the words are drug names or not.