Skeptics' Circle

The first Skeptics’ Circle of 2007 is up at Enceladus.

Posts debunking weird ideas — from astrology to psychics solving crimes — make for fun reading. And included in the brew is a dose of sea salt from Junkfood Science.

Skeptics Circle ends on a serious note, with articles emploring critical thinking when confronting alternative modalities. Infophile takes a pragmatic approach, showing how skepticism can save people money.

Moonfake writes of a televangelist’s brother who abandoned cancer treatment, choosing to believe in alternatives, and is now dead.

And Orac writes of the heartbreaking saga of a young girl whose parents rejected conventional chemotherapy and pursued alternative medicine for her cancer. His post title, “Sometimes I hate being right,” reveals what happened and is must reading. He closes:

I’m still able to have enough magical thinking left to hope for a miracle that would save her life, but my skeptical side knows that the odds of a spontaneous remission at this point are vanishingly small....It’s times like these that I wish that woo worked.