There are people that lay their complete trust on their family doctor when it comes to dealing with illness.  In contrast, there is a large group of people that prefer trusting their health to their local alternative medicine doctor. Both groups make a similar assumption about the other and that is, that the type of care they choose is superior to the type of care the other chooses. Complementary medicine is an approach that takes the best of both types of medicines. Some people make the mistake of thinking that complementary and alternative medicine refers to the same thing. The distinction between complementary and alternative medicine is that complementary medicine is used together with conventional medicine, whereas alternative medicine is used in place of conventional medicine. It is important to also note that complementary and alternative medicine are both separate from a strict conventional approach. An example of complementary medicine is the use of aromatherapy to help lessen the pain after surgery, whereas a alternative medicine approach would probably forgo the surgery completely in favor of alternative methods and finally the conventional approach would use powerful pain killers to relive the pain from a surgery and make no use of aromatherapy. Because both approaches use alternative methods, the complementary and alternative medicine approach is scoffed at by a large number of health physicians and although there is much research still to be done for complementary and alternative medicine, a large group of people have benefited tremendously from an alternative medicine health care.