I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong, anyone), that the idea of ceiling fans is precisely to move the air around.

All our ceiling fans have switches on them to change their direction of rotation. From what I've heard, you're supposed to set the fan to blow upwards in the winter and downwards in the summer. In the winter, the fan will blow upwards at the ceiling, forcing the hot air down the walls and heating the whole room. This makes your central heating's job easier, and makes you feel like the heat in the room is more consistent. So in the end the hope is that the fan could save you money on heating.

In the summer, the idea is the more straightforward kind, where the fan will supply a down-draft directly onto you, using evaporative cooling with your sweat to cool you. Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of being cooled by having a fan blowing on me. I tend to feel a little ill from that, plus I generate a great deal of internal heat, so the fan in our bedroom doesn't help me much because if I even have just the bed sheet on me, I'm trapping all the heat I'm generating under the covers and in the bed its self. I've always secretly coveted this Japanese product. It doesn't do any actual cooling either, but it's carrying the heat away, and it's not blowing directly on me, which I don't like.

In the end, my preference is to keep the house cooler. It costs a great deal, but it's the only way I'm comfortable. As my wife says, it's "like a meat freezer in here." Yup! And I LOVE IT!

*edit*
ps- however, I continue to constantly battle the temperature difference between our two floors. For example, at this moment our office and bedroom on the second floor are 77 and 75 degrees, respectively, but our first floor is about 67. NOTHING I do gets these two floors anywhere near the same temperature.