Pharmacology in the general sense is the study of drugs and their interaction with the body. This is a required study for most medical-related courses including Physical Therapy.
Pharmacology courses are often taken for Continuing Professional Education credits by professionals working in the field of medicine and who need to fulfill CPE requirements to keep or renew their license to practice.
Pharmacology Online Courses for Physical Therapy
To enable you to study and work at the same time, Pharmacology courses are now also being offered via the internet. Various levels of Pharmacology courses are available online, i.e. Pharmacology 101 and 102; enabling you to take any or all of the courses thru the internet.
You can check with the online school if their courses are for credit or if these are simply being offered as auxiliary courses to actual courses for credit.
Basically, when you check a specific online school for your Pharmacology online courses for Physical Therapy, the school provides an advisory on whether or not their courses are accredited which means that you can take these for credit hours.
It wouldn’t however, to double-check with the school just to be on the safe side.
Course Topics
Generally, Pharmacology courses for credit are Pharmacology 101, 102 and 103. Each one of these courses has its own set of topics to allow you to get comprehensive lessons per topic – all related to PT of course.
You have to be specific about your courses though because there are also Pharmacology courses that are geared towards nursing and other medical fields.
Pharmacology 101 gives you the basics of Pharmacology; starting with a brief definition and introduction. You will also be given specific scenarios where Pharmacology applies to physical therapy.
Apart from these, you will also learn about the perimeters surrounding proper drug prescriptions, taking into full account the legalities and rules that govern drug prescriptions.
Pharmacology 102 digs deeper into Pharmacology, this time taking on such topics as pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics. You will also get more information on drug classifications as well as the correlation between PT modalities and pharmacokinetics.
Finally, with Pharmacology 103 you get to understand more about the various structures of pain and the effects of drugs on the body as they work to eliminate pain.
You can also learn more about the differences between steroidal and non-steroidal drugs, and how to properly prescribe them to your patients.
Neuropathic pain and pain as a result of life-threatening diseases such as cancer are likewise thoroughly discussed in this course.