PharmacoVig_BOS 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…

Careful with the causal language. Two things moving together in a period when five things changed is not a mechanism, and stating it as one makes the thread less useful to somebody reading it later.

PharmacoVig_BOS 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…

That is right, and it stops being right at the edges. The general case is well behaved; the interesting cases in this thread are all at the boundary where the general case breaks.

PharmacoVig_BOS 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…

Thank you for spelling out the reasoning rather than just the conclusion.

Clinical perspective, offered as context rather than as advice. The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated. Those two sets overlap less than the confident tone of most write-ups suggests, and the second set is where nearly all the disagreement on this board comes from.

That is the short version; the long version is somebody else's post.

Closing the loop on my own question.

Follow-up — getting the denial reason in writing was the step that mattered. It named the criterion, and the criterion was a document I already had.