VendorMark 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…

That is right, and it stops being right at the edges. The general case is well behaved; the interesting cases in this thread are all at the boundary where the general case breaks.

VendorMark 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…

That reframing is the part I needed.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. Worth answering the question that was asked rather than the one behind it. The narrow version usually has an answer; the broad version usually does not, and answering the broad one is how a thread stops being useful.

jim_asheville said:

Worth answering the question that was asked rather than the one behind it.

Adding a me-too, because a thread of one person's experience is not much use. Nothing to add that would improve it.

jim_asheville said:

Worth answering the question that was asked rather than the one behind it.

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. The honest answer is that the effect is real, the magnitude is contested, and the individual variation is larger than either. Those three things can all be true at once, and most arguments here are two people holding different parts of that.