Building a sensible monitoring schedule with your prescriber posts 91–109

An honest declaration on building a sensible monitoring schedule: I have a prior here and it is strong enough that you should weight what I say downward. Stating it rather than hiding it.

Post #91 put the caveat in the right place and I want to underline it.

Building a sensible monitoring schedule sits at the boundary between what this community can usefully discuss and what it cannot, and I think it falls on the discussable side, narrowly.

The arithmetic in post #92 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.

Having read the whole building a sensible monitoring schedule thread before replying: the question in the first post has not actually been answered yet, and three of us have answered a nearby one instead.

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.

Stating my assumptions rather than smuggling them in.

Distinguishing three things in the building a sensible monitoring schedule discussion that keep getting used interchangeably: the observation, the proposed mechanism, and the recommendation that gets attached to both.

Understood. Thank you for being specific about the limits of it.

Everything in post #94 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.

What I would tell a new member reading about building a sensible monitoring schedule for the first time: the confident posts are not the reliable ones, and the reliable ones are longer.

Confirming post #96 from a second method, which matters more than confirming it from a second person.

Glycaemic markers integrate over different periods. A point glucose and a longer-term marker disagreeing is not a contradiction; it is two different questions.

Not a conclusion. A place to stand while looking for one.

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.

Worth saying I have only my own numbers here, and n is small.

I would keep building a sensible monitoring schedule and the decision it usually gets used for separate in this thread. They are related and they are not the same question, and merging them is why the last one went badly.

Post #100 describes the usual case. This is about the unusual one.

Repeat before acting is standard practice for an isolated abnormal result on most analytes, and it is standard for a reason.

I have written this out at length because the short version keeps being misread.

On building a sensible monitoring schedule the community has more anecdote than the confidence in this thread implies, and I include my own contribution in that.

The practical version of building a sensible monitoring schedule is three sentences long. The rigorous version is three pages and reaches the same conclusion with the conditions attached.