Counted your hot flashes before a dose change and again after it? Two stretches of different lengths cannot be compared until they are both turned into a daily rate. This does that arithmetic, and gives you one sentence you can read out at an appointment.
“I had 84 before and 45 after” sounds like a halving. If the first stretch was two weeks and the second was ten days, it is not: six a day became four and a half a day, a drop of about a quarter. The comparison people actually make in their heads is almost always distorted by the two periods being different lengths, and the period after a change is nearly always the shorter one — because you start counting the day something happens and stop counting the day of the appointment.
So the first thing to do with two counts is divide each by its own number of days. Everything after that is a comparison of like with like.
A night episode costs more than a daytime one: it takes the rest of the night with it, and the next day too. If the daytime rate falls and the night rate does not, a single combined figure will show a modest improvement and hide the thing that is still ruining your week. The optional night fields above report that separately for exactly this reason.
This is arithmetic, not medicine: the fewer days in a stretch, the more one bad day moves the average. Three days with a cold in them can look like a failed dose. A fortnight either side is a comfortable comparison; a week either side is usable; anything under five days should be read as a hint rather than a result, and the calculator will say so.
What the number of days cannot tell you is how long a particular therapy takes to settle, or whether a change is working as intended. That is a conversation for the person who prescribed it.
This is arithmetic, not a verdict. The calculator divides and subtracts — it does not know your therapy, your history, or what else changed in those weeks, and it cannot tell you whether a dose is right. Take the numbers to the person who prescribed it; that is what they are for.
If you are not counting yet, start with the free printable hot flash diary — one page, seven days, with a totals row at the bottom that feeds straight into the fields above. Fill one sheet in the week before a change and one in the week after, and you have both numbers.
Attune logs a hot flash in one tap from an iPhone or Apple Watch, marks every dose change on the chart, and does this comparison on its own — with sleep and resting heart rate from Apple Health alongside it, so you can see whether the nights improved too. The summary comes out as a PDF for your appointment.
$49.99/year, 7-day free trial. No account — your entries stay on your iPhone.