LabKate 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…

True, and it depends on a baseline nobody has stated. Without knowing where someone started, the same number can be an excellent result or a disappointing one.

Correct me if the detail matters more than I have assumed.

LabKate 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. Sending this to two other people who asked me the same thing last week.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. 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.

newstart_MO said:

The distinction that resolves most of these threads is between what is true on average and what is true for one person.

This is my experience too, for whatever a second data point is worth. I had assumed I was the exception until I read this.

newstart_MO said:

The distinction that resolves most of these threads is between what is true on average and what is true for one person.

Coming at newstart_MO’s question from a different direction. The honest answer is that the effect is real, the magnitude is contested, and the individual variation is larger than either. Those three things can all be true at once, and most arguments here are two people holding different parts of that.

I would rather be corrected than agreed with, if it comes to it.