Complementary medicine is used in conjunction with more traditional remedies; alternative medicine is used by itself. Everday Health has the information.

Complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM, is a category of medicine that includes a variety of treatment approaches that fall outside the realm of conventional medicine. An increasing amount of research is being done to establish the safety and efficacy of alternative medicine. But compared with traditional "Western" therapies such as drugs, research on alternative medicine is still limited.

Complementary and Alternative Medicine: What’s the Difference?

It is important to understand the difference between complementary medicine and alternative medicine — the two approaches are often lumped together but are, in fact, distinct.

Complementary medicine refers to healing practices and products that work in conjunction with traditional medicine. For example, a cancer patient receiving chemotherapy may also undergo acupuncture to help manage chemo side effects like nausea and vomiting. Alternative medicine differs in that it is not used as a complement to, but rather as a substitute for traditional therapy. An example would be a cancer patient who forgoes recommended chemotherapy and instead chooses to treat the disease with specific dietary changes.

There is a third category that also often gets lumped in with conventional and alternative medicine — integrative medicine. Integrative medicine draws from both complementary medicine and alternative medicine and combines these with traditional Western therapies, says Donald Abrams, MD, director of clinical programs for the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

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