SarahChen_PharmD said:

HPA axis assessment on the hormone panel: rarely ordered but informative for understanding the stress-metabolism connection: 4-point salivary…

This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. 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.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the same conditions. Nobody wants that answer and it is still the answer.

DataDave said:

Twenty people reporting the same thing is twenty samples from the same self-selected pool, not twenty independent confirmations.

Coming at DataDave’s question from a different direction. Take it one variable at a time. Almost every unanswerable question in these threads is unanswerable because three things changed in the same fortnight, and no amount of subsequent argument can untangle them after the fact.

A narrower follow-up, since the general answer is now clear:

Did your prescriber agree with that reading, and if not what was their objection?

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.