Footnotes

• Contributors CH conceived the idea for the editorial and wrote the first draft; JKA added further discussion, and the two authors contributed equally to the final manuscript.

• Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

• Competing interests CH holds grant funding from the NIHR School of Primary Care Research Evidence Synthesis Working Group (project 390) and the NIHR Oxford BRC. He is editor in chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine and an NIHR senior investigator. He is director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM), which jointly runs the EvidenceLive Conference with the BMJ and the Overdiagnosis Conference with some international partners, which are based on a non-profit model. JKA has written and edited articles and textbooks on adverse drug reactions, including Meyler’s Side Effects of Drugs (16th edition, 2016), its companion volumes the Side Effects of Drugs Annuals, and Stephens’ Detection and Evaluation of Adverse Drug Reactions (6th edition, 2011). He is an associate editor of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine and a member of the CEBM (see above).

• Patient consent for publication Not required.

• Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.