Prefixing an "!" symbol to commands you type in pdb seems to have the same effect as doing something in an IPython shell. This works for accessing help for a certain function, or even variable names. Maybe this will help you to some extent. For example,
ipdb> help(numpy.transpose)
*** No help on (numpy.transpose)
But !help(numpy.transpose) will give you the expected help page on numpy.transpose. Similarly for variable names, say you have a variable l, typing "l" in pdb lists the code, but !l prints the value of l.