Home|Journals|Articles by Year|Audio Abstracts
 

Educational Forum



Learning pharmacology by metaphors: A tale of antihistamines

Gurudas Khilnani, Ajeet Kumar Khilnani, Rekha Thaddanee.




Abstract

Learning is facilitated by the use of proper instructional design. There are many creative forms reported for effective learning of medical subjects. Creative writing requires a great deal of intuitiveness and imaginations, using anecdotes, figures of speech, and stories from the literature. Often, homologies and analogies are given in metaphors, transforming inanimate drugs into live human beings, who tell about themselves to convey desired information. By such metaphors difficult topics in pharmacology can be narrated in simplified manner which maintain curiosity and stimulate interest and thus core components can be retained due to vivid rhetoric effect on memory. Here, we describe a metaphor of antihistamine (AH) drugs in which there is lively narration of mechanism of action, therapeutic uses and adverse effects and comparison of sedating older AHs with newer non-sedating second generation drugs. One of the AH drugs acts as a colorful raconteur and narrates evolution of AH therapy.

Key words: Antihistamines; Inverse agonist; Metaphors; Pharmacology






Full-text options


Share this Article


Online Article Submission
• ejmanager.com




ejPort - eJManager.com
Refer & Earn
JournalList
About BiblioMed
License Information
Terms & Conditions
Privacy Policy
Contact Us

The articles in Bibliomed are open access articles licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.