Building a sensible monitoring schedule with your prescriber — setting out what I have, and where I think it stops being reliable.
Building a sensible monitoring schedule — I have the observation and I do not trust my interpretation of it, so I am posting the observation and holding the interpretation back.
Numbers, method and the conditions under which they were collected are below. Interpret them however they warrant.
Time of day: some biomarkers vary across the day. Cortisol in the morning differs from cortisol in the evening. Comparing results from different times of day is comparing things that are not the same.
Building a sensible monitoring schedule came up in a thread eighteen months ago and was answered well. I cannot find it, which is itself the problem, so here is the reconstruction.
A trend needs at least three points to be a trend. Two points are a line and a line through noise is still a line.
Checked the building a sensible monitoring schedule claim against the primary source this morning. It survives, with a narrower scope than the version quoted here. Posting the narrower scope.
Taking post #7 at face value and following it one step further.
Repeat before acting is standard practice for an isolated abnormal result on most analytes, and it is standard for a reason.
I would put a moderate confidence on that and no more.
Taking building a sensible monitoring schedule seriously for a moment rather than deflecting: the honest position is that the community has observations and no controlled comparison, and those two things support very different sentences.
Where I part company with post #10, and it is a narrow parting.
Marking my uncertainty on building a sensible monitoring schedule explicitly. I am confident about the direction, much less confident about the size, and not confident at all that it generalises past the case in the first post.
That reframing is the whole thing. The facts I already had.
Two people in this thread mean different things by building a sensible monitoring schedule and are disagreeing about the definition while believing they are disagreeing about the facts. Worth pausing to define it.
The arithmetic in post #16 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.
A trend needs at least three points to be a trend. Two points are a line and a line through noise is still a line.
I would want the raw data before agreeing with my own summary of it.
Answering the question post #15 raises rather than the one it answers.
Agreed on building a sensible monitoring schedule, with one qualification that I think matters. The reasoning holds for the case as described. Change the starting assumption and it does not, and the starting assumption is the part nobody states.
Time of day: some biomarkers vary across the day. Cortisol in the morning differs from cortisol in the evening. Comparing results from different times of day is comparing things that are not the same.
Genuine question rather than a rhetorical one: has anyone here actually observed building a sensible monitoring schedule, as opposed to read about it? The thread is long and I cannot tell.
I read post #19 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
Two questions I would want answered before drawing anything from the building a sensible monitoring schedule data above: how were the cases selected, and what happened to the ones that dropped out.
Post #19 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
Repeat before acting is standard practice for an isolated abnormal result on most analytes, and it is standard for a reason.
Posting my building a sensible monitoring schedule numbers with the method attached so they can be discounted properly. Uncontrolled, unblinded, and collected by someone who wanted a particular answer.
Time of day: some biomarkers vary across the day. Cortisol in the morning differs from cortisol in the evening. Comparing results from different times of day is comparing things that are not the same.
Caveat: everything above assumes the paperwork is what it says it is.
Reading rather than answering, but this is the post I would point somebody at.
Adding a small correction to the building a sensible monitoring schedule summary above rather than a disagreement with it. The substance holds; one of the figures is out by a factor that matters.
A trend needs at least three points to be a trend. Two points are a line and a line through noise is still a line.
I am confident about the direction and much less about the magnitude.
One caution on building a sensible monitoring schedule: everything above assumes the underlying documentation is what it claims to be. That assumption is doing real work and is rarely stated.