Pharmacology for Nursing Care

Fellow nursing students, I won't lie to you--pharm isn't going to be the easiest class that you'll be required to take. However, this text will be one of the few during your college or graduate school career that will actually do what it sets out to do: explain its subject matter in an understandable manner. Even among the understandable ones, few authors do it with as much grace or charm as Lehne, whose writing about a dry subject like pharmacology is conversational (all the time), encouraging (all the time), and drolly hilarious (when he jokes about killing his wife's dog with the theobromine in chocolate). The text is a good professor distilled into book format--all 10 pounds of it. Make no mistake, this book is a doorstopper and could be used as a lethal weapon. Yet, despite its weight (not to mention length), you'll very rarely feel like you're reading a science textbook. Most chapters are between 10 to 15 pages, offering a decent level of detail for a generalist RN student without being boring. Text within the chapters comes in different shapes and sizes: important drugs are in full-size font, less important ones in small print. The only thing you might miss are are a lack of the glitzy photographs that you see in a lot of other textbooks, but this helps keep the cost down: my general biology textbook back during undergrad was about half as thick, yet cost 50% more. Lehne uses a "prototype" approach for teaching drugs: he'll give you a single drug from a specific class (say, Prozac from the SSRI antidepressants,) and once you learn the mechanism of action, side effects, and other important details about that particular drug, it will be relatively easy to infer how the rest of the drugs within the same class operate. This will be much easier than trying to memorize every characteristic of every drug ever, especially when new drugs are always being released. There are a few confusing parts to the text--Lehne's explanation of digoxin's mechanism of action could use a bit of clarification, the chemotherapy and antiviral chapters are a bit too long--but these few gripes are not enough for me to seriously consider marking down such an excellent text. I am ordinarily not one to save books after I pass a class, but as I move forward in nursing school, I still find myself referring back to this book as my first resource whenever I need to look up an unfamiliar drug for clinical or class. I'll end with a bit of advice for your pharm class in general: find the prototype drug in each chapter, create index cards that list the GENERIC NAME (avoid trades when possible, generic names often offer a clue to drug class), mechanism of action, side effects, target receptor, and physical signs that you should look for to assess a drug's effectiveness (or lack thereof). Above all else, actively read this book! It WILL help you, unlike most other texts. Best of luck! You can do it!

This is a required textbook for a university's nurse practitioner program. I had previously taken a pharmacology course from a junior college. The comparison between the two courses' textbooks is immense. First, I have to comment on the size of this text's fonts. It seems like the publisher realized that 1400 pages was the max it could safely fit into a backpack without people filing claims about back injuries. So, the font must have been shrunk a little smaller than normal reading size to allow for a need to reduce pages. The junior college text was only about 800 pages and a 12 pt. font. Second, the quality of the author's intent in publishing this textbook shows from the start. The j.c. textbook was written well. But, this textbook is geared towards teaching the student why this course, book, and understanding the information is extremely important. There is a lot of passion in this text. So much so that I find myself reading it ahead of the class because it's interesting to read. The examples the author gives in the implications of pharmacology and the nursing process are incredibly clear and concise. Those examples give depth to the reasoning behind why nurses play a critical role in pharmacological treatment. Great text!

This was required reading for my pharmacology class. It is an awesome book, packed with information about all medications. There isn't very much 'fluff' in this book though so it makes it very hard to read, it is pretty much impossible to skim through. I recommend you don't even try to highlight because everything is important. The Elsevier also had chapter key points and quizzes (with rationals) on their website for free with the book. Unfortunately for my class though, we were required to to read 8-10 chapters a week and were tested on 22-28 chapters at a time so we could cover the whole 110 chapters in a semester (this book is like 3" thick). It was insane, and I feel like I didn't get all the information I could have gotten from this book if I had more time to actually read it. If your instructor plans on going through the whole book in a semester, I recommend starting to read regularly a month or so early.

The book presented good background information on body systems in order to understand how the drugs worked. There was good detail on all the drugs too, everything I needed to know. However the book was at times written in rather informal fashion (such as addressing the reader and the style of some illustrations) that made it seem unprofessional at times. Overall it was a worthwhile purchase.

This book is BIG, but it is filled with so much useful information. It really has become a lifeline for me, as I am in Pharmacology for Nursing right now. The chapters are not horrible to read because there is not a lot of unneeded information. I found that highlighting in this book is also extremely helpful. Dr. Lehne does a great job conveying what is needed to do well in pharmacology. There is a lot of information in this book, and he makes it bearable to read and understand. At some points, I even forgot I was reading a 1000+ page book about drugs. This is the first nursing book that I have actually read and enjoyed. So, even if you are not a textbook reader, buy this book. It will change how you feel! Outstanding textbook!

I used this book as part of a graduate nursing course. Pharmacology isn't the most exciting topic, but I feel the author made a great attempt to make it interesting. He included topic features that relate to everyday life and scattered a little humor in some of the topics. He delved a lot into the physiology which I'm taking a separate class for so I didn't use that part of the text book. I can't comment on the online student resources that came with the book because I didn't use them. I think the book was structured well considering the vast amount of drug classes that were covered.

This is the only text book I have ever in my life actually wanted to read. The people who put this book together did an amazing job. They define every single term. Unlike my horrid "Pathophysiology: The Biological Basis for Disease in Adults and Children" text book. I don't even read my patho text book anymore because not only does this book explain pharmacology so well, it does an great job at explaining the pathophysiology behind all of it too. This book correlates everything so well and when I read it I imagine one of my instructors reading to me, not a robot. Any nursing student will love this book!

This textbook is amazing. I used it for a pharmacology class and have used it throughout nursing school. It's easy to read and makes learning your drugs just a little bit easier. The end of chapter reviews are helpful too. I bough the book used and it seems like it was barely used (just a little bit of highlighting). It's one of my go to references that I will keep around well after nursing school.

Received with thanks

I purchased it here instead of at my school's bookstore and it has saved me some money. I mean it is the required textbook for a particular course so I did not really review it again any other pharm book.

Great book, in my opinion it's the best one for nursing great explanations and details. From all the pharmacology books this is the one I would choose

overall good Q, arrived before its expected delivery date . satisfied :)

This book has tonnes of information and it is laid out in a clear and consistent manner. Great textbook for nursing pharm