patPC_UT said:

Almost every unanswerable question in these threads is unanswerable because three things changed in the same fortnight, and no amount of subsequent…

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.

Ask again with the specifics and you will get a better answer than this one.

Closing the loop on my own question.

For the archive: it took about six weeks rather than the two I expected, and the difference between those two numbers was the whole of my problem.

Clinical perspective, offered as context rather than as advice. 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.

Found this through search years later and it is still the best discussion of the question, so adding one thing. 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.

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

paige_pharma 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. Whatever the answer turns out to be, the method for getting there is the same: state the assumption, do the arithmetic in public, and invite the correction. That is slower than asserting, and it is the only version that survives being wrong.