Skip to Main Content

Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Information for students researching CAM topics

Search Tips

For better search results, try using Boolean operators:

AND connects terms and narrows the search


OR  expands the search (finds either term)


NOT use to exclude terms


For example:

  • stress AND meditation
  • "herbal medicines" OR botanicals
  • (yoga OR meditation) AND well-being
  • "massage therapy" NOT reflexology

Recommended MCC Library Databases

Use your MEID and password to access these databases off-campus

1. Academic Search Premier - a multidisciplinary scholarly database which includes many CAM journal titles.

2. Academic One File - A multidisciplinary peer-reviewed database with coverage of CAM and health topics.

3. Science Full Text Select - All full-text content of nursing and health related topics.

4. MEDLINE - National Library of Medicine's premier database covering medicine, health care, preclinical sciences and more.

5. CINAHL Plus with Full Text - Nursing and health database with CAM coverage

6. Health Source Nursing/Academic Edition - Provides coverage of nursing and allied health topics from over 500 scholarly full-text journals.

7. Science Direct - A leading source for scientific, technical, and medical full-text research including over 2,500 peer-reviewed journals.

Researching CAM with PubMed

Use CAM on PubMed® to search for journal articles related to CAM therapies, approaches, and systems–from acupuncture, to herbs, to traditional Oriental medicine. Your literature search will be automatically limited to the complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) subset of PubMed. Currently, there are over 462,000 citations in the CAM subset of PubMed.

Literature searches are free and may include links to full-text articles.

See an MCC reference librarian if free full-text is not available through PubMed. The full-text may be available in an MCC database.