In the sometimes exhausting daily slog of fighting relentless nonsense belief, it is good to just stop and acknowledge the good work skeptics can accomplish. Skepticism is motivated not just by a desire to be right but to do good, to help people avoid the harm of unfounded belief. Tim Crookham of North Texas Skeptics recently had a minor victory as a “citizen skeptic” in this regard. Here’s Tim giving the details:

On Saturday, March 9th, I went down to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.  It's a new museum that opened in Dallas in December of 2012.

At the end of my visit I stopped by the gift shop.  While looking around the museum store, I saw a necklace in a box with the words "Titanium Sport Energy Necklace" printed on the box.  It looked like the braided necklaces I’ve seen baseball players wear.  I picked up the box and the description on the back read something like "works with your body's energy field to increase energy and promote well-being."  It also had things like "good for those with back pain and poor circulation".  I've seen enough Randi talks, Penn & Teller B.S. shows, and Richard Saunders clips that the skeptical alarm bells were ringing loud and clear.  I was both shocked and disappointed that this found its way into the museum.  I tried to find an employee to tell, but the store was packed. 

I went back to the store the next day and talked to an employee and the store manager and told them this necklace was pseudoscience and doesn’t belong in the museum.  They told me that the buyers for the store are in California and that they would pass along my concern.  They were nice, but didn't seem to understand that this was not a good thing to have in a science museum.  I went home and drafted an email to the museum in which I included some web links such as one from sciencebasedmedicine.org regarding the unscientific nature of the product.  I remembered Eugenie Scott saying that it's important to copy knowledgeable people and organizations on emails and the two that came to my mind were the JREF and the Skeptic Society.  I also copied the museum's PR director since the email address for the museum was just a generic info@ email address.  Below is my email: 

Dear Perot Museum Representative,    

I came across some alternative medicine pseudoscience being sold at the Perot Museum Store and was shocked and disappointed.  The item that caught my attention was the Titanium Sport Energy Necklace.  This item claims to work with the body's energy field to increase energy and promote health.  There is no scientific evidence to support those claims.  As a member of the Perot Museum, I request that Titanium Sport Energy Necklace and any other pseudoscientific merchandise be removed from the museum store so as to align the store with the scientific mission of the rest of the museum.  Below are articles regarding energy necklaces and their lack of scientific support. 

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/pseudoscience-sells/#more-15791 

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500368_162-4525964.html 

http://www.wired.com/playbook/2010/11/baseball-phiten-neckwear/all/  

Regards, 

Tim Crookham, Perot Museum Member  

The next day I received a formal response from the museum saying, "Thank you so much for your input. We will coordinate with the Museum Shop to effect removal as soon as possible." Yay for science and skepticism!!!

I’ll second that, Tim. Score one for the good guys.

Do you have any other examples of how simple acts of skeptical activism at the local level have led to such positive change? Let us know in the comments below.

D.J. Grothe is president of the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Here is a rundown of the top stories in pseudoscience, the mysterious and questionable claims from the past week courtesy of Doubtful News

Welcome to the week in the strange, the bizarre and the unnatural, as Jack Palance used to say at the beginning of Ripley's Believe it or Not TV show. You may wonder how people believe this stuff…

Actor Russell Crowe made headlines this week not for his new movie but for putting up a You Tube video that supposedly recorded a UFO. It was solved within a day; not a UFO.

A strange flying thing causes concern over New York's JFK airport.

Here is a recap of the stories that appeared last week at Science-Based Medicine, a multi-author skeptical blog that separates the science from the woo-woo in medicine.  

Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s cancer “success” stories update: Why is the release of the Burzynski sequel being delayed? (David Gorski) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/burzynski-success-stories-update-movie-sequel/ The second movie about Burzynski and his antineoplaston cancer treatments has been delayed, supposedly due to an international distribution deal, and pre-orders for the movie are no longer being taken, “due to high demand.” Dr. Gorski speculates that there might be another explanation: one of the patients featured in the movie as a success story has stopped posting her latest scan results, and a recent video shows facial asymmetry, suggesting that her brain tumor has continued to grow.  

A recent study which is getting a lot of press finds a correlation between the consumption of processed meat (bacon, hot dogs, sausage), and all-cause mortality. Like many such studies, however, the exact implications are tricky to work out.

This is an observational study, meaning that it is able to detect correlation only, and not establish causation. However, it should be pointed out that when correlations hold up over numerous types of observation they can be used as a legitimate way to infer probable causation. In other words, I do not dismiss correlational data out of hand. It is one type of evidence, and has to be put into context.

In this case, however, it is very problematic. The study found that people who eat large amounts of red meat and processed meat has a significantly higher rate of death (all cause mortality). However, the correlation with red meat did not hold up when corrected for measurement error, while the correlation with processed meats did. For completely, they also found no association with eating chicken.