Arsenic can significantly extend survival in patients with a rare form of leukemia, US researchers say.
"It's a much smaller dose than you would use to poison people," Dr Bayard Powell of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Centre said.
Adding arsenic to standard treatment can extend patients' lives and prevent relapse, Dr Powell says.
The effect is so impressive that patients may some day be able to skip chemotherapy but that will take more testing.
"This study has redefined the standard of care," Dr Powell said, who presented results from the large, three-year study at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
The patented laetrile is a partly synthetic (man-made) form of amygdalin, while the laetrile/amygdalin made in Mexico comes from crushed apricot pits."
Though it is sometimes sold as "Vitamin B17", it is not a vitamin. Amygdalin has been advocated by some as a "cure" or a "preventative" for cancer, but due to a lack of scientifically accepted evidence of its efficacy, it has not been approved for this use by the United States' Food and Drug Administration.
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