Paramedic Flash ad: Why I stopped making my own flashcards 👆

Unpopular opinion: instructors who tell you to make your own flashcards are setting you up to fail pharm. I know that sounds harsh. My instructor told our whole class that writing it out is how it sticks. That's what I thought too. Let me explain. Three weeks before my paramedic midterm I had 187 handmade index cards rubber banded on my kitchen table. Every med, every dose, every contraindication, in my own handwriting. I work full time on an IFT truck, so I wrote them between transfers and EVERY night after shift for a month. And I STILL couldn't keep atropine and adenosine straight without flipping the card over. I'd get through the stack, feel good, and the next morning half of it was GONE. So I'd rewrite the ones I missed, which just meant more cards. My partner on the truck started calling my clipboard the card factory. Then I got a 62 on our pharm quiz. In my program you need an 80 on the midterm. You get one retest, and if you fail that you repeat the WHOLE course. Another semester of tuition, which for me meant another loan on top of the $9,800 I already owe. And I'd told my girlfriend I'd be a medic by summer so we could finally get our own place, and now I was picturing my whole cohort graduating without me. The next morning I got to class early and couldn't make myself go inside. I sat in my car in the school parking lot with the rubber band stack on my lap, doing loan math in my head, and just cried. Luis knocked on my window. He's in our cohort, and he's repeating the course. He looked at my stack and said "I made those exact cards last year, just like our instructor told us to. That's why I'm here TWICE." He said the cards were the problem, not me. I told him I'd even rewritten a whole set in colored pens, red for heart meds, blue for breathing meds, and it didn't help AT ALL. Every card was still just a wall of my tiny handwriting. "That's the thing," he said. "You're reading words. You need to SEE it." Then he pulled out his deck, and it was nothing like mine. Visuals and charts instead of walls of text, every med laid out the exact same way so your eyes go straight to the dose, the indications and the contraindications, and the med math drawn out instead of written out. He said he wished he'd had them the first time. I ordered my own sitting right there in the parking lot. When mine came, the more I looked, the more I liked it. Every med has an organ on the front, so you know the body system at a glance. The deck even shows the needle insertion angles for the different routes, and the text on the back is color coded. Luis told me most medic students are visual learners, and he'd read about a study years ago that found the same thing. Not every student learns the same way, and some need a different kind of study tool before the information actually makes sense. I'd been writing out block after block of text. That's what Luis meant by "you need to SEE it." With these, I didn't just memorize a drug. I could picture it and actually understand it. I stopped rewriting and went through them a section a night. Med math was the part that scared me most, and the dopamine clock card made the drip calculation click in like ten minutes after I'd fought with it for weeks. I got an 89 on the midterm. I'm not saying cards took the test for me. I still studied every single night. I just stopped spending those nights making cards and started spending them learning. I graduate with my cohort this spring, and I didn't have to take out a single extra loan. My 187 handmade cards are in a shoebox under my bed. I can't make myself throw them out lol, that's a lot of hours. So if your instructor told you to make your own cards and you're up at midnight rewriting the same drug for the third time, please stop. It's not you. It's how you were told to study it. These are the ones Luis showed me. They come with PDF guides for med math and peds dosing too, and they have a pass or get your money back guarantee, which is honestly why I didn't think twice: paramedicflash.com/products/paramedic-pharmacology-cards