After does not necessarily mean because of

Happened after does not automatically mean happened because of. If this site has a house rule, that is it. The rule is not a way of talking people out of their experience. It is a way of stopping experience from being stolen by a conclusion that the data cannot carry.

Questions that preserve sequence

• Temporal association — did it happen afterwards?
• Dose response — did it change when the dose changed?
• Dechallenge — did it improve when exposure stopped or reduced?
• Rechallenge — did it recur if exposure resumed?
• Baseline — was it already present?
• Confounding — what else changed?

None of these automatically proves causality in an individual. Together they make a better conversation than “the tablet did this” or “the tablet did nothing”.

Confounders that get forgotten on purpose

• Another medicine, or a reduction of another medicine.
• Sleep.
• Stress, illness, substance use, hormonal change.
• The underlying condition returning, or being noticed properly for the first time.
• Previous symptom history.
• Environmental events.
• Chance.

Words that are not interchangeable

• Report — someone described an event.
• Proportion — a count over a known group.
• Incidence — new events in a defined population over time.
• Association — a statistical relationship.
• Causality — a claim that one thing produced another.

We are not asking science to be thrown out. We are asking for the evidence loop to include the life it is about.

Walk through a sequence