Lebanon Pharmacy Colloquium common mistakes
Lebanon Pharmacy Colloquium · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Calculating a compounded preparation's strength or a pediatric dose in one mental step and writing the final number without showing units or intermediate conversions (e.g., mg/mL to mcg/kg/min, or percent w/v to mg/mL).
Candidates trained on multiple-choice recall skip dimensional analysis under time pressure; percent concentrations and ratio strengths are routinely misread as absolute amounts, so errors stay invisible until the answer is wrong.
What to do instead
Adopt a fixed written template for every calculation: state the ordered dose, the available concentration, the patient factor, then perform unit cancellation line by line with units carried through, and sanity-check the result against a known reference range before committing.
Choosing a drug or regimen from memorized first-line lists without checking the patient's comorbidities, renal/hepatic function, pregnancy status, or interacting medications described in the vignette.
Exam preparation often emphasizes drug-class facts over the clinical reasoning step; candidates pattern-match the diagnosis to a drug and stop reading, missing the contraindication deliberately embedded in the case.
What to do instead
Before selecting therapy, write down three patient-specific filters (organ function, contraindication, interaction) and test the chosen drug against each; if any filter fails, name the alternative and justify it.
Treating a drug's structure as an isolated drawing rather than linking functional groups to ionization, solubility, metabolism, and receptor fit when answering chemistry items.
Medicinal chemistry is often studied as nomenclature and synthesis routes; candidates memorize names without practicing the structure-activity reasoning the questions actually test.
What to do instead
For each drug class, build a one-page map: key pharmacophore, ionizable groups with approximate pKa, metabolic soft spots, and how each modification changes potency or half-life; rehearse explaining the map aloud.
Identifying a crude drug or natural product only by its common name or a single marker compound, without distinguishing the plant part, extraction method, or adulterant being described.
Pharmacognosy content is frequently learned as a name-to-use list; exam items that vary the plant part or specify a chromatographic fingerprint then defeat simple recall.
What to do instead
Study each natural product as a profile: botanical source and family, part used, principal active constituents, characteristic quality tests, common adulterants, and standard therapeutic use; quiz yourself by varying one variable at a time.
Applying a general ethical principle or a foreign regulatory rule to a Lebanese practice scenario without citing the applicable national framework (ministry regulation, syndicate or order rules, or pharmacy practice norms).
Candidates study ethics abstractly and assume international standards transfer unchanged; they then answer what 'should' happen rather than what Lebanese law and professional regulation require.
What to do instead
Maintain a short reference sheet of the governing Lebanese instruments for prescribing, dispensing, controlled substances, and professional conduct, and practice mapping each vignette to the specific rule before choosing an answer.
Answering patient-counseling or pharmaceutical-care items with a list of drug facts instead of a structured, patient-centered plan covering the presenting problem, adherence barriers, monitoring parameters, and follow-up.
Candidates conflate counseling with information delivery; they omit the assessment and follow-up steps that distinguish pharmaceutical care from a label reading.
What to do instead
Use a consistent care-plan framework (problem, assessment, individualized plan, monitoring, follow-up date) and practice converting each vignette into that structure, including at least one adherence or health-literacy consideration.
Ignoring inventory and financial variables - turnover, reorder points, expiry risk, generic substitution economics - and answering dispensing or management items purely on clinical grounds.
Management and pharmacoeconomics feel secondary to clinical content, so candidates under-prepare and miss that the question is asking for a cost-effectiveness or stock-control judgment.
What to do instead
Learn a small set of core formulas (inventory turnover, reorder point, cost per outcome, markup versus margin) and practice applying them to short scenarios, explicitly stating which economic or operational criterion drives the answer.
Attributing an adverse event to the most recently started drug or the most famous culprit without assessing temporal sequence, dose relationship, alternative causes, and dechallenge or rechallenge information.
Candidates rely on memorized classic adverse reactions and skip causality assessment; they also confuse an adverse drug reaction with a medication error or an underlying disease progression.
What to do instead
Apply a structured causality tool to every toxicology vignette, documenting onset timing, plausibility, competing explanations, and response to withdrawal, and state explicitly whether the event is a reaction, an error, or neither.
Confusing incidence with prevalence, or relative with absolute risk, when interpreting an epidemiological or pharmacovigilance item, and reporting a signal as if it were proven causation.
These terms are learned as definitions rather than as quantities used in reasoning; spontaneous-reporting data are then over-interpreted as incidence rates.
What to do instead
For each data item, write the numerator, denominator, and time frame before computing anything, and state whether the figure supports association, causation, or only a hypothesis requiring further study.
Under-reporting or misclassifying adverse events because the candidate assumes only serious, labeled, or certain reactions belong in a pharmacovigilance report, and omitting required report elements.
Candidates fear submitting a false report or believe reporting is the prescriber's job; they also do not know the minimum dataset (patient, suspect product, reporter, event) a valid report requires.
What to do instead
Memorize the minimum reporting criteria and the local reporting channel, then practice drafting complete reports from short vignettes, including a nonserious but unexpected reaction, to internalize that suspicion - not certainty - triggers reporting.