It seems like back before modern medicine was a thing, prescribing arsenic for almost all ailments was all the rage. I’m going to assume that people weren’t just idiots in the past and that there was a reason for that.
Do small amounts of arsenic make you feel temporarily good or something like that? Is it a case of arsenic being useful for one specific illness and doctors then prescribing it for everything? Basically, why would they prescribe poison to people???
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Most of the things that make you sick are living things themselves. So giving yourself a dose of poison that isn’t enough to kill you is likely to kill some of them, and killing even some of them is likely to make you feel better even with the effects the poison has on you. It’s not great, because you’re still poisoning yourself, but it may be better than nothing.
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