Dr.ReproEndo said:

The honest answer is that the effect is real, the magnitude is contested, and the individual variation is larger than either.

Coming at Dr.ReproEndo’s question from a different direction. 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.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. Worth stating the units and the reference range whenever you post a number here. A large fraction of the apparent disagreement in these threads is two people using different units and both being right.

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

Did your prescriber agree with that reading, and if not what was their objection?

TirzTom said:

Worth stating the units and the reference range whenever you post a number here.

Pushing back on TirzTom here. Pushing back on the anecdote-stacking. Twenty people reporting the same thing is twenty samples from the same self-selected pool, not twenty independent confirmations.

TirzTom said:

Worth stating the units and the reference range whenever you post a number here.

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.