Complementary treatment refers to therapeutic approaches used alongside conventional medical care to support health, relieve symptoms, or improve wellbeing, as distinct from alternative treatments intended to replace standard medicine. The category spans a broad range of modalities, including herbal and plant-derive…
Complementary treatment refers to therapeutic approaches used alongside conventional medical care to support health, relieve symptoms, or improve wellbeing, as distinct from alternative treatments intended to replace standard medicine. The category spans a broad range of modalities, including herbal and plant-derived preparations, dietary and nutritional interventions, acupuncture, massage, mind-body practices, and various traditional healing systems. Many complementary therapies draw on the long-documented medicinal use of plants and natural products, whose bioactive constituents are investigated for anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and other pharmacological effects. In clinical contexts, complementary measures may be adopted to manage symptoms, reduce side effects of primary therapy, or address aspects of health not fully met by conventional treatment, as in dietary modifications used to support management of particular conditions. The defining feature of a complementary approach is its integrative use with, rather than instead of, evidence-based medical care. Rigorous evaluation, through controlled studies, biomarker assessment, and standardised outcome measures, is essential to distinguish therapies with demonstrable benefit from those lacking established efficacy or mechanistic plausibility, and to characterise safety, dosing, and potential interactions with conventional drugs. By examining how adjunctive interventions affect physiological markers and clinical outcomes, research on complementary treatment aims to define which practices can be responsibly incorporated into integrative care and under what conditions they offer measurable benefit.
10 peer-reviewed articles, ranked by relevance. Each links to its DOI.
The 10 articles above have been cited 56 times in the scholarly literature. Citation data via OpenAlex and Crossref, updated Jun 2026.
A sample of recent works citing this journal's research on Complementary Treatment, linking to each citing work.