Supportive measures like psychotherapy, diet advice, creative activities and massage therapy may be equally rewarding in complicated cases like cancer etc.,
I am succesfully using the diet supplementation. The aminoacids (the special food supllement) and some koenzymes and vtamins can work for patients in recovery phases after aktinoterapy and surgery. Any patients suffer by relativer depletion of some micronutrients. The objective evidence is very expansive that i am use the questionare and antropometry only.
Perhaps one first has to define what "conventional ways of treatment" and "complimentary therapies" in each case exactly means, e.g., by defintion of the particular disease, the individual patient (personalised medicine) etc. From my personal point of view, a chemico [pharmaco]-centric treatment-model of human diseases is not the core of a 21th-century-medicine that adopted the bio-psycho-social model since decades. In cancer, e.g., there is usually a need for chemotherapy (but not only when we address the suffering subject and if we want to treat a human being, not only a neoplasm). When we talk about mental disorders, e.g., like personality disoders, there are no drugs that are in the centre of therapy but psychotherapy - against this background psychotherapy isn´t "complimentary" at all.
we may call conventional therapy as chemo or synthetic drugs therapy, radiotherapy as in case of cancers and surgery as so widely used. other therapies may be taken as complimentary, like acupuncture as non mainstream, homeopathy, Ayurveda or herbal, and lot many non-material sciences, like biofeedback, zen training, aromatherapy and so and so forth. in fact the approach is to adopt most body friendly treatment with highly remote effect of normal healthy state. thnx