DataDave 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…

Filing a mild objection. Mild because I might be wrong; an objection because nobody has addressed the case that does not fit. The objection nobody has made: this only works if the measurement is doing what we assume it is doing, and that assumption has not been tested here.

DataDave 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…

No disagreement, though the timescale matters more than the mechanism here. Most of what looks like a difference in kind turns out to be a difference in how long somebody waited.

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

Closing this out. What actually changed my mind was the point about waiting for a trend instead of reading a single measurement, which is embarrassing in hindsight and worth saying anyway.

Coming back to something from earlier in the thread, because it keeps being talked past:

Yes, and the corollary is less popular: if the reasoning holds, it also holds where it produces an answer we do not like.

sarah_TO said:

Yes, and the corollary is less popular: if the reasoning holds, it also holds where it produces an answer we do not like.

Mine went the same way, slower.