As a pharmacy technician, you will need to become familiar with several different medications. This will include knowing the brand and generic names as well as what these medications are used for. This can be intimidating at first, but learning to use some specific clues and tricks will help. At KLR Pharmacy Technician Training School, students have worked together to come up with additional clues to remember some of these, but below is a list of common drug suffixes (the ending part of a word), and some examples and tips for each one. It is important to remember when utilizing these clues, that you are using the generic name of the medication! Once you have these clues memorized, you can simply look at the generic name of a medication and know what it is used for! For example, Xanax has a generic name of Alprazolam. For someone with knowledge of these clues, it would be easy to look at the generic name ending and recognize that this medication is used for anxiety!
Drug suffixes tell you how the medication works and what it does
What have you learned about drug suffixes?
Drug suffixes are the endings of medicine names that can tell you what type of medicine it is or how it works. For example, drugs that end in cillin like amoxicillin are usually antibiotics that fight bacteria. Drugs ending in pril like lisinopril are used for treating high blood pressure. Understanding these endings can help us know what the medicine does.
What have you learned about drug suffixes?
I have learned that drug suffixes can help identify medications more easily by indicating the function of the drug and its drug class. For example, suffixes like -olol suggest beta-blockers, which are used for heart conditions, while -statin indicates drugs that lower cholesterol. This system makes it simpler to understand a drug's purpose and category at a glance.
In pharmacy, drug suffixes can provide valuable insights into the class of medication and its intended use. Understanding these suffixes can help pharmacy technicians identify drugs more easily and recognize their therapeutic effects.
By familiarizing themselves with these suffixes, pharmacy technicians can improve their ability to communicate about medications, assist in dispensing, and provide patient education effectively.
Medication suffixes are used to identify which medication is used for what. to identify medications more easily