alex_tucson 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…

Correct as far as it goes. The part it does not cover is what to do when the honest answer is "not enough data", which is more often than anyone likes.

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

alex_tucson 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…

Genuinely useful, thank you. I had the facts and not the framework. Adding it to my notes with a link back to this thread.

Clinical perspective, offered as context rather than as advice. Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then measure again under the same conditions.

PedsEndoPhilly said:

Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then…

Can confirm. Same sequence, different timescale.

PedsEndoPhilly said:

Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then…

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. 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.