Enhancing Memory Using Mnemonics Acronym: An Undergraduate Traditional Chinese Medicine Pharmacology Course

Introduction

Traditional Chinese medicine students find pharmacology challenging because it is complicated, yet they still need to understand facts about the mechanism of actions of drugs and how to use this knowledge in clinical settings.

Mnemonics are strategies that can enhance learning and memory of course material. Mnemonics are memory techniques that aid in chunking and organizing material to be learnt; as a result, they improve encoding and ease retrieval. There are variety of forms that include acronyms and acrostics (also known as first-letter mnemonics), the loci method, the peg word method, the keyword approach, auditory, visual, and kinesthetic mnemonics, and a group of semantic-based mnemonic devices such as rhymes, songs, and stories.

Bian et al. (2020) mentioned the importance of mnemonics in the complex medical topics such as Cardiac cycle. The authors agreed that it can be challenging for teachers to teach Cardiac cycle with a Wiggers diagram to undergraduate students, because it is difficult for them to understand since it contains a large amount of information. In their study, they concluded that, simple mnemonic could make a didactic lecture more effective.

A study conducted on 481 undergraduates who were currently enrolled in, or had taken, at least one college-level psychology course was recruited and found the ratings for mnemonics were positive and correlated with independent measures of metacognition (McCabe et al., 2013). The other study, involved 159 students of undergraduate courses as well as medical and dentistry faculties of the Golestan University of Medical Sciences in Iran demonstrated that the hand mnemonics, a type of visual mnemonics was useful and provided better insights into ion channel gating for them (Hosseini, 2018).

As described in the literature, the role of mnemonics in medical education and practice is undeniable with the fact that there are plenty of publications about this topic worldwide (Lewis Jr., et al., 2018).

In this chapter, we are going to introduce mnemonic to understand the adverse drug effects.

Mnemonic And Understanding Adverse Effects Of Drugs

The term “cholinergic agonists” refers to a class of drugs that function in a manner similar to acetylcholine (Pakala et al., 2022). One of the most prevalent neurotransmitters in the human body, acetylcholine affects both the central and peripheral neural systems. The authors propose a mnemonic, to memorize adverse effects observed with cholinergic agonist “MUD-DN,” which includes Miosis, Urinary urgency, Diarrhea, Diaphoresis, Nausea (Harvey et al., 2011). To memorize it easily the authors proposed the acronym as “Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Nature” or “MUD DAY NIGHT”. The authors suggested to students to memorize “MUD DAY NIGHT,” as a phrase to a widely used mnemonic. Cholinergic agonist has been clinically indicated to treat Alzheimer's disease, glaucoma, paralytic ileus, urinary retention, and myasthenia gravis (Patil & Upaganlawar, 2020). The component of “MUD-DN” has been given in Table 1.