Dr.SleepRoch said:

It helps to ask what evidence would change your mind before you look at any.

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. The trials generally allowed a step to be held or reduced and then retried, and people who did that mostly arrived at the same place a few weeks later. The end point of the ladder is set by tolerability, not by a schedule, and there is no evidence that reaching the top faster produces a better outcome.

One concrete data point for the thread. Keep the original post as written when you update it, and add the correction underneath. An edited-away mistake is invisible to the next person who makes it.

Following on from Dr.SleepRoch — and this may be the naive question:

What the trials actually did with participants who could not tolerate a step, because that is the situation I am in and the protocol summaries skip it?

raj_cambridge said:

Keep the original post as written when you update it, and add the correction underneath.

I do not accept the framing. The question has been narrowed to the version that has a tidy answer, and the part that was dropped is the part the OP actually asked about.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.

raj_cambridge said:

Keep the original post as written when you update it, and add the correction underneath.

Agreed on the arithmetic, with one condition: holding indefinitely at a dose that is not doing anything is not patience, it is a stall with a nice name. The distinction is whether appetite has changed at all at the current step.