PharmacoVig_BOS said:

If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way.

I read this differently from PharmacoVig_BOS, on substance rather than tone. Pushing back on the anecdote-stacking. Twenty people reporting the same thing is twenty samples from the same self-selected pool, not twenty independent confirmations.

PharmacoVig_BOS said:

If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way.

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.

PharmacoVig_BOS said:

If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way.

Thank you — that is the clearest version of this I have read, and I have read a lot of them.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. 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 measure again under the same conditions.

Closing the loop on my own question.

Reporting back with a partial result, because a partial result is still better than silence. Two of the three things suggested helped; I cannot separate them and I am not going to pretend otherwise.