Stepping down deliberately, and how to do it without losing progress — what changed since

If you are stepping up mainly because the schedule says so rather than because the current dose has stopped doing what you wanted, that is worth noticing before rather than afterwards.

The number is defensible. The precision I gave it is not.

Concentration and dose get conflated constantly in this subcategory. Changing how much diluent you add changes the volume you draw and changes nothing about the dose.

Concentration and dose get conflated constantly in this subcategory. Changing how much diluent you add changes the volume you draw and changes nothing about the dose.

I have deliberately not rounded that, because the rounding is where the argument starts.

Appreciated. The plain phrasing does more work here than a longer post would.

Dose and effect are not linear across the studied range for every compound in this class. Assuming a doubled dose gives a doubled effect is the reasoning error behind most disappointment.

I read post #64 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.

Half steps are arithmetically simple and pharmacologically unstudied. They are not dangerous in any obvious way and they are also not what the evidence describes, and both halves of that should be said.

It is the sort of thing that seems obvious in retrospect and was not at the time.

Fine by me. I had wanted a stronger conclusion and there is not one available.

Building on post #84 rather than restating it.

Reaching a dose and staying there for a year: the question of whether a stable dose remains effective over years is mostly answered by the withdrawal trials and by real-world reports. The dose does not seem to stop working, but the longest trials are not indefinitely long.

That has held every time I have looked, which is not the same as always.

Confirming post #97 from a second method, which matters more than confirming it from a second person.

There is no published evidence about slower escalation because nobody studied it. That means the trials support not going faster and are silent on going slower, which is a different claim from "slower is fine".

I have separated what I observed from what I concluded, which does not always happen.