How do doctors and nurses memorize all those different medications for diff. illnesses?
By organizing the information in their brains… Imagine all of the pages of a book – when the book is bound with the pages in order, it makes sense. If you took all of the pages and shuffled them, the book wouldn’t make any sense – especially if you only saw a few of the pages occasionally. There’s also a vocabulary factor – there aren’t that many commonly prescribed medicines out there, but they all have ridiculous names. Doctors are able to make sense of the nonsense names, most lay people aren’t.
They don’t actually memorise all the medications. Doctors and nurses get so used to using the medications within their specialty that it does seem as if they know them all, but they will not know drugs from another area of expertise. You might notice that your General Practitioner will refer to a manual (called MIMS in Australia) to double check medications as they are expected to know about a wider variety of drugs, which can be all too much to remember, as you point out!
