Muscle cramps: the ordinary causes before the exotic ones

Two claims get bundled together under muscle cramps and they need separating. The descriptive one — this is what was observed — is usually well supported. The causal one — this is why — usually is not.

Almost every disagreement in threads like this one dissolves once you say which of the two you are making.

Severe, persistent abdominal pain, especially radiating to the back, is in a different category from ordinary gastrointestinal upset and is a reason to seek medical assessment rather than to post about it.

Someone will know this better than I do and I hope they say so.

Worth separating two things that post #17 runs together.

Adding a reference point for muscle cramps. Mine is a single case, collected without controls, and I am posting the method alongside it so it can be discounted appropriately.

Since muscle cramps keeps coming up, it should probably be a maintained page rather than a recurring thread. I am happy to draft it if someone with more direct experience will review it.

The arithmetic in post #32 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.

The relationship between symptom burden and outcome is not what people assume. Feeling worse is not evidence of a larger effect and feeling nothing is not evidence of an inactive preparation.

Useful. I had the fact and not the reason, which turns out to be the important half.

Noted, and I have changed what I was going to do on the strength of it.

This follows post #83 rather than contradicting it.

Where I have landed on muscle cramps, having got it wrong once in public: the direction is clear, the magnitude is not, and anyone quoting a precise magnitude has borrowed it from somewhere that did not measure it.

Worth separating muscle cramps as a question about the compound from muscle cramps as a question about the documentation. They get answered by different people and only one of them is answerable here.