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@Oliver Schick
Do you have links to documented cases where this has actually happened, or are they merely suspected owing to being hard to document/hard to track down?
For me, quite apart from possible consequences for people's physical health, the key thing to understand about esoterics is that it fills a 'need' for many people with mental health difficulties. Their ability to think clearly is often impaired, so that they look for easy 'solutions'--things that superficially seem to make sense (in their condition) and mask some/all of the problems that they are wrestling with--looking for an ideal world, or at least a world in which, while it's not 'ideal', they can feel special, and part of the '(s)elect'.
Much of esoterics creates the illusion of an 'antidote to science'--esotericists exploit people's unhappiness with a vision of a world as painted by scientismists (for want of a better word)/people's warped perception of science, in order to try and replace it with their random concoctions of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, e.g. Ms Welch's crap about 'quantums'. Suddenly, you don't have to be a clever scientist any more to understand the world. You can just follow the leader/sophist and trust their 'judgement'. It's something at which you don't have to work--you just have to accept that the 'leader' is right (and these people are often extremely persuasive and manipulative to the vulnerable).
The upshot is that it can get people deeper and deeper into their mental problems--it serves to prevent decisive action to change the situation for the better, make a break with the past, etc. I know of three cases personally where that has happened. In some cases, I don't doubt, finding something to cling onto is life-preserving, or may even keep people out of secure facilities, but it's not much of a 'life'. Generally, I think it leads to people becoming isolated and thinking the world is out to get them, while (in some cases) seemingly preserving a sunny disposition, but still having things eating away inside.
Right down to payment, one of the things for which Plato criticised the sophists the most, the parallels with ancient sophism are very striking, and in that sense it is of course not only pseudo-science, but also pseudo-philosophy.