How to read a funnel plot

Started 13 April 2025 · 24 replies · 267 hearts · read 4.4k times

PatrickLimerick, IE · 13 April 2025

1.3 years ago

Something I have been sitting with: How to read a funnel plot Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

I have read the paper and I am not sure I have understood it.

Here is where I am. The medication side has been more or less as described, and the part nobody prepared me for is everything around it: what to say to people, how to plan a week, and how to tell the difference between a thing to endure and a thing to raise.

My prescriber has been fine, genuinely. The problem is that I get nine minutes twice a year and there is no version of nine minutes that covers this.

I will report back either way, because I have been helped by other people's follow-ups more than by their questions.

TheaBergen, NO

Please do not read the comments under news articles about this. I lost a fortnight to that.

10me too 4

SunilFacilitatorBirmingham, UK

Before anyone offers a remedy: what has been described here is on the list of things that need a clinician today rather than a thread. I am going to be firm about that, kindly.

NilsUppsala, SE

Similar here, and mine turned out to be a completely unrelated deficiency picked up on bloods.

TiborBratislava, SK

What the reply above described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

I have been in this circle a year and this question comes round every few months. It is not a silly question. It is the question.

XanBerlin, DE

Yes. All of this. I had the same in my third month and I remember thinking there was something specifically wrong with me, which there was not.

StellanMalmö, SE

What the reply above described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

Mine lasted about seven weeks and then lifted over a few days. I cannot tell you why. I can tell you it lifted.

5me too 8

NadjaBelgrade, RS

Gently disagreeing with the reply above, or rather adding the other half of it.

Two things that helped me, neither of them clever: small amounts more often, and drinking a lot more than felt necessary.

GilTel Aviv, IL

I would take that to a clinician rather than to us, and I would do it this week. Not because it is definitely serious — because it is the sort of thing that is much easier to rule out than to worry about.

PrunellaBury St Edmunds, UK

Gently disagreeing with the reply above, or rather adding the other half of it.

Have you got anyone who can be with you when you do it? It made an enormous difference to me and I felt silly asking.

HattieExeter, UK

#10

The thing that changed it for me was going slower, agreed with my prescriber. I am not suggesting you do that. I am saying the conversation exists.

AmmiKarachi, PK

#11

Practical, boring answer: write the three questions down before you go in. I have never once remembered them otherwise.

BeaDublin, IE

#12

I did exactly the same and felt terrible about it. You have not done anything wrong.

GwendaEbbw Vale, UK

#13

Reading the reply above, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

Coming back to this a fortnight later to say it settled. Leaving the update because I hate reading threads that stop.

PerrineStrasbourg, FR

#14

I am the person who had the frightening version of this. I went in, it was investigated, and it was not what anyone feared. Going in is the whole of my advice.

14me too 2

NkemPort Harcourt, NG

#15

What helped was lowering my own expectations of the week rather than trying to hold the week together.

EphraimBrooklyn, NY

#16

the reply above said something I want to sit with for a second.

My experience was very boring, which I offer as data. Some of us just get a dull time of it.

PriyaReading, UK

#17

I asked my nurse the same question and she said something I have repeated ever since: that the aim is to keep you on treatment, not to get you up the schedule.

8me too 6

SaoirseKilkenny, IE

#18

the reply above — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

Different experience here, for balance. Mine did not improve and in the end I stopped, and that was the right call for me. Both outcomes exist.

FabianBasel, CH

#19

What the reply above described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

My pharmacist was more use than anyone. Ten minutes at the counter, no appointment, no charge.

JunoBrighton, UK

#20

Can I gently push back on one thing? Not the substance, just the framing — you have written twice that you should be coping better. Who told you that?

11me too 8

TarqWindsor, UK

#21

the reply above said something I want to sit with for a second.

I am about four months behind you and I have been dreading exactly this, so thank you for writing it down before I got there.

TildaCambridge, UK

#22

Yes to the burping. It is real, it is unbeautiful, and it does settle.

SunilFacilitatorBirmingham, UK

#23

Gently: you have apologised three times in a post where you have done nothing that requires an apology.

GwilymCaernarfon, UK

#24

It got worse before it got better for me, which I wish someone had said. About ten days of worse.