Powerful medicine, powerful side effects! Remember that these are large heavy atoms that the body's metabolism is not used to dealing with. Many proteins, enzymes, ion channels, signalling moecules, etc are affected. When western medicine takes the approach of using compounds like this, it is clear that they don't quite understand what they are doing.
(Another example comes to mind - lithium for bipolar disorder - a chemical that interferes with everything but "works" and therefore is still used. Side effects really suck, though).
Be careful with these biologically very active "inert" elements. For amusement, visit "argyria" page on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria
