Every transmitter is a triad: where it is made, what it does, and the disease when it swings. Acetylcholine down means memory. Dopamine down means movement. Learn the swing, then own the four dopamine pathways and the drugs that ride the chloride channel.
Start where most people slip. Boards rarely ask a transmitter by name. They hand you a disease and make you name the transmitter that fell, or the one that surged. Read the patient, then call the swing.
The whole page runs on one shape. Learn every transmitter as this triad and the diseases fall out for free.
Tap a source on the brain. Its transmitter, function, and classic disease appear on the right as one triad. These are the seven the boards return to again and again.
Tab through each one. Read the swing arrow on the disease row: the color tells you up or down.
Dopamine runs four wires out of the midbrain, and the boards test what happens when a drug cuts each one. Tap a wire, predict the result of blocking its D2 receptors, then reveal. Guess before you look.
Two patients overdose on two different sedatives. Both drugs open the same chloride gate, but in two different ways. Watch the gate, then call which drug did it. This one wins points every exam.
"He took his sister's anxiety pills. He is sleepy but wakes to voice and his breathing is fine. Down the hall, another patient took an old seizure barbiturate and is barely breathing. Same channel. Different gate."
The two look-alike pairs that cost points, both faces on the surface: how the sedatives differ, and how strychnine differs from tetanus.
The whole nervous system is a tug of war between two teams. Know which transmitter plays for which side.
Boards love a poison. Walk one decision tree with the answer hidden until you commit, tap the drug cards to reveal each target, then lock the hooks.
Think strychnine. It sits on the glycine receptor so glycine is released but cannot brake. Awake, arched, spasming.
Think tetanus toxin. It cleaves SNARE proteins so inhibitory glycine and GABA never leave the neuron. Lockjaw, risus sardonicus.
Think tetrodotoxin or a local anesthetic. That stops nerve conduction entirely (numbness, weakness), not a spasm.
Tap a card to reveal its target and the one-line consequence. Test yourself first.
Tap each card to unblur the hook. These are built to survive the test.
Ground the abstractions in real tissue and real signs, then run the board bank until the swings are automatic.
Tap any image to enlarge. Each one is a transmitter story you can see.
One vignette at a time. Right-click or long-press a choice to cross it out. Double-click or double-tap to highlight it. Choices and cases shuffle, and nothing repeats until the bank is empty.
