Cancer Treatment

Remember this is the HalfBakery, and any suggestion with a title like you see above should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Okay, researchers have for decades been seeking a "magic bullet", a drug that will kill cancer cells without killing ordinary cells, which are basically just like cancer cells except they are more self-controlled. No wonder they call that drug "magic"!

In actual practice, see, the anti-cancer drugs that are currently used are all quite toxic to most of the cells in a body -- but they are MORE toxic to cancer cells, and so the notion is that the cancer cells will die while the rest of the body merely becomes very sick (with weight loss, hair loss, and all those other side-effects you've heard about).

What MIGHT be an acceptable alternative is some sort of toxin that kills everything in its vicinity for a short time, and then deactivates. (See annotation by [st3f] about "local chemotherapy".) So even if you lose some normal cells in the vicinity of a cancer, injecting this "bullet" into the midst of a cancerous lump should exterminate the cancer and leave the rest of the body healthy. Unfortunately, most toxic things stay toxic after doing their work, so this sort of cancer treatment doesn't get as much press as whole-body treatments.

Nevertheless, I have stumbled upon a notion which might qualify! The Magic Bullet I am proposing is.....


{drum roll, please}


A large grain of salt!


Seriously. Ordinary table salt, sodium chloride, has some very interesting properties that might just fit the bill. Let's pretend we have just inserted, as suggested above, a large grain of salt into a cancerous lump. What is going to happen?

(Okay, I agree that some local anesthetic might be a Good Idea; "rubbing salt into a wound" is a famously painful cliche`, after all.)

First, dry salt is a very "hygroscopic" substance. It strongly attracts water from its surroundings. This property, in fact, is why salt has been used for centuries as a very good preservative for food, against bacterial assault. The salt steals the water from inside the bacteria and kills them! And for a large grain placed inside an equally cellular assailant, a cancerous lump, it can be expected to do exactly the same thing.

Second, as the salt starts to dissolve in the water it attracts, a very briny solution will be the result. Your ordinary medical "saline solution" (about 1% salt) is nothing like this. Even the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and the Dead Sea in Israel, are not this salty. Initially, it probably is even saltier than the brine used to preserve food, which means it is still toxic to the cells it encounters. These cells, of course, are still inside that cancerous lump. The net effect is that, as the salt crystal dissolves, the brine seeps into the surrounding tissue and kills more than just the immediately adjacent cells.

Third, the longer any bit of salt persists in the body, the farther it travels from its source-crystal and the more it will become diluted in the ordinary fluids of the body. There IS a point below which a concentration of ordinary table salt is non-toxic!

Thus IN THEORY, The Proper Way To Implement This Idea is to measure the size of the cancer that is being targeted, and to insert an appropriately-sized salt crystal. As the crystal dissolves it kills that cancer and only a small amount of surrounding healthy tissue, before becoming diluted to ordinary harmlessness. And not magic, at all!