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Dr.EM_Chicago said:

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…

Coming at Dr.EM_Chicago’s question from a different direction. Most of what circulates confidently in this community traces back to one summary of one study, and the qualifier was dropped somewhere in the third retelling.

One concrete data point for the thread. 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.

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

What did you change at the same time, and can you separate the two now?

DataDave 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…

Filing a mild objection. Mild because I might be wrong; an objection because nobody has addressed the case that does not fit. The objection nobody has made: this only works if the measurement is doing what we assume it is doing, and that assumption has not been tested here.

DataDave 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…

True, and it depends on a baseline nobody has stated. Without knowing where someone started, the same number can be an excellent result or a disappointing one.