Complementary medicine is used together with conventional medicine, and alternative medicine is used in place of conventional medicine. Integrative medicine combines conventional and CAM treatments for which there is evidence of safety and effectiveness.
While scientific evidence exists regarding some CAM therapies, for most there are key questions that are yet to be answered through well-designed scientific studies questions such as whether these therapies are safe and whether they work for the purposes for which they are used. Scholarly peer review is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal. The work may be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given (narrowly defined) field, who are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial review.
Last date updated on September, 2024