There's some breaking news over at Scientific American, and it's pretty startling: apparently the results yielded by a three-year study, unveiled on Saturday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, are that arsenic – yeah, the poison kind – may be a major key in beating your deadlier forms of cancer into submission.

Seriously. That is seriously impressive. What seems to be happening, according to the article, is that while traditional chemotherapy just goes in and kind of kills everything it can, the arsenic appears to "kill preferentially," zeroing in on cancer cells like a sniper. One could argue that, like a sniper, arsenic is a very precise killer and therefore a pretty scary drug to give to someone even in the most dire and desperate of circumstances. When you consider, however, that chemotherapy was born from mustard gas, it's really all relative. The researchers are also quick to point out what should be obvious: that the dosage is much smaller than what it would take to kill anyone. (Otherwise, it would kind of defeat the purpose.)

It's all still very much in the experimental phases and due for much more research and testing, and doctors haven't come to a consensus yet on whether the arsenic trioxide treatments will be used before or after or in conjunction with or altogether separate from traditional chemotherapy, but at the very least it is progress. In this kind of field, any sort of progress is very, very good.


Apparently arsenic has been used as a remedy in China for thousands of years; _DictionaryGirl_ wonders how this news story could possibly be spun to work in favor of the antifreeze-in-the-toothpaste guys.