Fig. 1.

An example of how the proportion of symptoms non-pharmacological has been calculated for a single listed side-effect on beta-blocker therapy. The square chart represents 100 patients with heart failure. The open circles show how many would expect to experience the side effect without the drug. The filled circles show how many additional patients would experience the side effect if all 100 took the drug. From this the physician and the patient can visualise the proportion of side effects that are non-pharmacological: it is the proportion of circles that are open. The spreadsheet that calculates these proportions, and automatically displays the square chart, operates on the free and open-source LibreOffice (www.libreoffice.org) or the widely-available Microsoft Excel. It is downloadable as an Online Supplement of this article.