This same logic connects directly to hypertension, and I try to make that connection in class. β-blockers, calcium channel blockers, and ACE inhibitors are not separate topics that happen to reappear in two different lectures; they are the same pharmacologic tools, chosen and combined differently depending on whether the clinical priority is blood pressure control, anginal relief, post-infarction protection, or all three at once. Teaching students to recognize a drug's mechanism as the thread that ties these diseases together is, in my view, more valuable than teaching hypertension and CAD as isolated units.
This is also where I try to make a broader point about the discipline itself: pharmacology is more than pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics. Knowing how a drug acts on its receptors, or how it is absorbed, distributed, and eliminated, is indispensable, but it is only the starting point. The real purpose of the discipline is to train physicians capable of correct prescribing: choosing the right drug, at the right dose, for the patient in front of them. That requires integrating mechanism with clinical context (a patient's comorbidities, their other medications, their ethnic background, their renal function, whether they are pregnant or planning to become pregnant). A student who memorizes that ACE inhibitors block the angiotensin-converting enzyme, but doesn't understand why they're contraindicated in pregnancy or why they're preferred in a diabetic patient with albuminuria, hasn't learned pharmacology in the sense that actually matters for clinical practice. That is why I insist that every class combine the "how it works" with the "when and why to use it". Because prescribing well is, ultimately, an exercise in clinical reasoning, not memorization.
