Dr.LeslieOBGYN said:

Most of what circulates confidently in this community traces back to one summary of one study, and the qualifier was dropped somewhere in the third…

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.

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.

One thing that is still open after Dr.LeslieOBGYN’s answer:

What would you measure differently if you were starting again?

hank_denver 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.

hank_denver 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…

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.

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