With the accelerating growth of big data, especially in the healthcare area, information extraction is more needed currently than ever, for it can convey unstructured information into an easily interpretable structured data. Relation extraction is the second of the two important tasks of relation extraction. This study presents an overview of relation extraction using distant supervision, providing a generalized architecture of this task based on the state-of-the-art work that proposed this method. Besides, it surveys the methods used in the literature targeting this topic with a description of different knowledge bases used in the process along with the corpora, which can be helpful for beginner practitioners seeking knowledge on this subject. Moreover, the limitations of the proposed approaches and future challenges were highlighted, and possible solutions were proposed.