DeniseRN_TPA said:

If two explanations both fit, the useful question is which one predicts something the other does not.

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. The distinction that resolves most of these threads is between what is true on average and what is true for one person. Both are real; they answer different questions and get quoted as if they were the same one.

Happy to go further on any of that.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a trend.

Following on from DeniseRN_TPA — and this may be the naive question:

How long did you give it before you decided it was working?

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

Late follow-up. I did not do what was suggested, I did something adjacent, and it worked; posting the difference in case it matters to somebody.

hank_denver said:

Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a…

Agreed, and the size of the effect matters as much as its existence. Something real and small gets treated here as though it were real and decisive.