Dr.KarenChen 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…

Coming at Dr.KarenChen’s question from a different direction. There is a difference between no evidence and evidence of no effect, and this subject is one where the two get swapped freely in both directions.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a trend.

Moderator note: a couple of off-topic posts removed. Thread quality here is what the rules are for. Keep it up.

lisa_labSD 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.

lisa_labSD 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, with the qualification that this is a self-selected group. The people for whom it did not work post less, and that shapes everything we think we know.