First time ordering from China — what worked for you?

PharmacoVig_BOS said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

I am going to disagree with the direction of travel here. The thread has converged on the tidiest answer rather than the best-supported one, and those are not the same thing.

Reporting back.

Closing the loop. The answer turned out to depend on the detail I had left out of the opening post, which is a lesson about how to ask rather than about the subject.

PharmacoVig_BOS said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

Genuinely useful, thank you. I had the facts and not the framework. Adding it to my notes with a link back to this thread.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. The mechanism and the magnitude are separate questions. Agreeing that something happens says nothing about whether it happens enough to act on.

Old thread, but it comes up first when you search for this, so it is worth updating. One habit that pays for itself: post the method alongside the number. A figure without its method cannot be checked, and an unchecked figure is how this community accumulates folklore.