Dr.PulmRoch said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

Pushing back on Dr.PulmRoch here. Filing an objection on the n=1 problem. Personal experience is genuine evidence about one person and very weak evidence about anybody else, and this thread keeps promoting the first into the second.

Dr.PulmRoch said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

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.

Dr.PulmRoch said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

That reframing is the part I needed.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. If two explanations both fit, the useful question is which one predicts something the other does not. That is answerable; arguing about which sounds more plausible is not.

That is the short version; the long version is somebody else's post.

Dr.MetabolicMD said:

If two explanations both fit, the useful question is which one predicts something the other does not.

Same experience, arrived at from the opposite direction. The detail I would add is minor and it is already implied above.