Saving Lives with SkepticismWe skeptics talk about many different things. Ghosts, psychics, intelligent design, cryptozoology, and dowsing are all frequent topics for our lectures and articles, but in most cases these are academic exercises. It's true that in some cases we might save someone pain and suffering, such as when people realize that the "psychic" who's been taking their $100 a week really can't talk to the dead, or when someone takes our advice and doesn't buy the $30,000 audio cables. For matters of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine," the stakes are higher and a skeptical viewpoint can actually save a life, as whatstheharm.net shows in some detail. But in the past year, we skeptics did something quite a bit more impressive. We literally saved hundreds if not thousands of lives, and it all started at a meeting at JREF headquarters.
But actually that's not true... as with many things skeptical, it begins with Randi, tirelessly dogging promoters of "woo-woo." A search of Google shows us nearly 1500 references to the word dowsing on randi.org, and that doesn't include the forum. Randi and the challenge have been responsible for demonstrating over and over again that dowsing does not work. It doesn't work with forked willow branches, pendulums, and it still doesn't work when batteries and ersatz electronic ciruits are added. We've seen this last form under the names "Quadrotracker," "Sniffex," and the later form of the Quadrotracker, "ADE 561." It's these "hi-tech" dowsers that turn a harmless delusion into a profitable and deadly deception.
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