DoseLogDan 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 on the substance. I would put less weight on the timescale, because two months of anything is not enough to distinguish a trend from a wobble.

Worth separating that from the trial evidence, which this thread keeps folding into the same question. They behave differently and the advice does not transfer.

DoseLogDan 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 — that is the clearest version of this I have read, and I have read a lot of them.

From the other side of the consultation, briefly. Start from the measurement rather than the conclusion. Almost every disagreement here turns out to be two people measuring different things and comparing the numbers anyway.

james_edin said:

Start from the measurement rather than the conclusion.

This matches mine closely enough to be worth saying so out loud.

james_edin said:

Start from the measurement rather than the conclusion.

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. Relative and absolute effects need reading together. A 20% relative reduction on a high baseline risk is a large absolute benefit; the same relative figure on a low baseline risk is a small one, and press summaries almost always quote the relative number because it is bigger.