They Help The Author Make Lots Of Money

3 Quarks Daily point us to an article in Scientific American by Michael Shermer called "SCAM Sham" that asks the simple question "If you need to pay for someone's help, why is it called "self-help"?"

Do these programs work? No one knows. According to Sa­lerno, no scientific evidence indicates that any of the countless SHAM techniques--from fire walking to 12-stepping--works better than doing something else or even doing nothing. The law of large numbers means that given the millions of people who have tried SHAMs, inevitably some will improve. As with alternative-medicine nostrums, the body naturally heals itself and whatever the patient was doing to help gets the credit.