From the other side of the consultation, briefly. 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.

SleepDoc_PDX 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…

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. If two explanations both fit, the useful question is which one predicts something the other does not. That is answerable; arguing about which sounds more plausible is not.

One concrete data point for the thread. For anyone reading later: the numbers in this thread are worth checking against a primary source before you act on them, including mine. Half the figures circulating in this community trace back to a secondary summary that dropped a qualifier.

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

Following on from SleepDoc_PDX — and this may be the naive question:

What would you measure differently if you were starting again?

Moderator note: two posts asking for a source have been merged into one. Please search the thread before asking again. No action needed from anybody.