Conventional optical diffraction tomography (ODT) techniques fail in the presence of multiple scattering, and the problem becomes even more challenging when the medium is also lossy. Iterative ODT (iODT), which was shown recently to be more tolerant to multiple scattering than conventional ODT, is here augmented with an error-subtraction (ES) module. Numerical results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of iODT with ES for reconstructing multiply-scattering objects with complex refractive index.