Know a little about “medicine” | Can you drink realgar wine?

The poem goes: After drinking a cup of realgar wine, I smell the fragrance of green rice dumplings. The atmosphere of the Dragon Boat Festival needs rice dumplings and realgar wine to bless it. Rice dumplings are delicious, but is this realgar wine drinkable?

The main component of realgar is arsenic sulfide, which is oxidized to produce arsenic trioxide, also known as arsenic trioxide, which is highly toxic. In addition, after entering the human body, realgar can also metabolize to produce toxic substances such as arsenite and methyl arsenic acid, causing arsenic poisoning and damage to the nervous system and digestive system. Realgar wine has so many "toxicities", so it cannot be drunk.

Just because realgar wine cannot be drunk does not mean that realgar cannot be used as medicine. The realgar in the Chinese patent medicines on the market is processed in a standardized manner, with precise dosage, and has been through toxicological tests and clinical verification. It is not the same as simply soaking it in wine. For example, the formula of Angong Niuhuang Pills contains realgar.