The class carries almost everything
Learn what a beta blocker *does* — the mechanism, the predictable consequences, the predictable side effects — and you have most of what you need for every beta blocker. The mechanism generates the side effects rather than sitting beside them on a list: bradycardia and bronchospasm are not facts to memorise, they are things you can *derive* once you know what the receptor does.
This is where elaborative interrogation earns its keep. For every side effect, ask *why*. If you can derive it from the mechanism, you never have to memorise it; if you cannot, you have found something genuinely arbitrary, and now you know it needs a card.
So what is genuinely arbitrary
- Names. Nothing about a drug's mechanism tells you what it is called. Pure memory. Use the stems — -olol, -pril, -statin — because the naming conventions are the one gift pharmacology gives you.
- Doses and numbers. Arbitrary and safety-critical.
- The exceptions. The drug in the class that behaves unlike the class. These are the most examined facts in the entire subject, precisely because they punish anyone who only learned the pattern.
- Interactions. Combinatorial and unforgiving.
That residue — names, numbers, exceptions, interactions — is a pure volume problem, and volume problems are solved by FSRS. Card it from your own module's drug list, because formularies and first-line choices differ by country and by guideline, and a downloaded deck may be quietly teaching you another health system's practice.