Flexeril:
I'm no where near graduation yet as I am an incoming P2. In regards to knowledge attained in pharmacy school, I'd have to say I learned a great deal in just the first year and earned straight A's with the exception of the first semester of pharmacokinetics (terrible professor and I didn't get anything out of the course, pulled off a B...). However, I believe it's absolutely normal to forget a lot you learn in school.
Professors themselves realize students will not recall all the indications of a particular drug class, doses, mechanisms of actions, enzymes inhibited/activated, biochemical pathways altered, and the detailed underlying pathophysiology one must learn in order to understand how a drug works. For example, in second semester pharmacology, I learned about congestive heart failure, angina, coronary heart disease, and cardiac arrythmias and the pharmacological treatment of these conditions. What can I say now? Honestly, I don't remember all the treatments for arrhymias...I can recall the classes and names of drugs such as quinidine, lidocaine, etc...but I remember little about these drug classes.
In reality, I'd say that pharmacy education and all education in general is provided simply as a foundational provision. Exposure to the material once will set up the foundation necessary for you to better learn on your own as a practicing pharmacist or other health care professional. You are not expected to remember everything...you will forget a lot you learn in lecture; in short, yes, to a certain extent, students are "downloading" the information into their heads and then deleting these files later; there's simply too much to know. What I can tell you is that you'd be surprised how much you can recall, especially if you have good retention. I happen to have excellent retention/recollection of previous knowledge and yet even I still forget things. I've heard students in my class comment that they have forgotten much of what they learned.
The good news is that even though you might believe you have forgotten everything, as soon as you expose yourself to the material again, you will begin to quickly realize how much you know, recognize, and recall from the past. You really haven't forgotten anything; your brain has stored this information at another level, perhaps subconsciously. Once you begin recalling, it'll be easy for you to understand everything because you've been exposed to it before and this previous exposure is exactly what the purpose of pharmacy school is...to give you the preliminary knowledge so that in the future you can understand it easily and build upon it on your own without any required intervention such as frequent testing. I proved this idea at the end of my first year when I asked a P4 student if she remember everything...guess what she said? She gave me a resounding NO. Even pharmacists don't know everything. Why do you think pharmacists have computer software readily available for dispensing of drug interaction information, doses, indications, etc.? Even the pharmacist I worked with for six months didn't recognize every single brand name/generic...the total volume of medical information is mind-boggling and doubles every two years making it virtually impossible for any healthcare practitioner to keep up. Just some food for thought...
