Drug Groups

DRUG GROUPS

To learn each pertinent fact about each of the many hundreds of drugs mentioned in this section would be an impractical goal and, fortunately, is unnecessary. Almost all the several thousand drugs currently available can be arranged into about 70 groups. Many of the drugs within each group are very similar in pharmacodynamic actions and in their pharmacokinetic properties as well. For most groups, one or more prototype drugs can be identified that typify the most important characteristics of the group. This permits clas-sification of other important drugs in the group as variants of the prototype, so that only the prototype must be learned in detail and, for the remaining drugs, only the differences from the prototype.