Sadly these have come with some terrible mishaps and mysteries that continue to confound the medical profession.

They say if you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything, and that's why health issues are always high on our agenda.

If women could peer into a crystal ball to learn their risk of developing a killer disease like breast cancer, not everyone would want to look.

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But very bravely, reporter Clare Brady did - travelling to Dallas, Texas to be tested with a world-first breast screening method to discover what her risks were of getting the disease that robs 2600 Australian women of their lives each year.

The BreveGen test was developed in Australia, but its initial roll-out was across the US.

Doctors like Rick Jacoby believe the gene technology empowers women - including those who don't necessarily have a history of breast cancer in their family - to get a step ahead of the disease.

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This year Australian researchers also heralded new hope for migraine sufferers.

Professor Griffiths and her team have discovered three different classes of genes that cause migraines.

"It is very exciting because this is the first gene that has definitely been identified in migraine (sufferers)," Dr Griffiths said.

More stories from reporter Pippa Gardner

She has hit on how to solve the problem that plagues so many. "Vitamins - mainly B and foliate. We've found people that have low levels of the enzyme which is abnormal. If we have more of the vitamins, we can make the enzyme work better. But more importantly, when we gave these extra co-factors, it dropped the frequency and the severity and the pain associated with migraines."

This year we also learned that Australia is now officially the world's food allergy capital.

In the past ten years life-threatening food allergies in preschoolers have increased five-fold, with 15,000 children diagnosed annually. Every classroom now has at least one child with a serious food allergy.

Associate Professor Katie Allen of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute believes the allergy epidemic may be due to our modern lifestyle, an overuse of antibiotics, delaying the introduction of certain foods, and geography.

"The early evidence suggests that the further you live form the equator, the more likely you are to have food allergy," Dr Allen said.

Until there is a cure, children will rely on modern medicine to keep them alive.

Unfortunately though, medicine does sometimes fail us and this year thousands of Australian have taken legal action over their faulty replacement hips.

Patients with such products as the Global Icon Hip, the Smith and Nephew Hip and the Dupew Pinnacle Hip are suffering the same issues that the Dupuy ASR patients are. The ASR metal on the metal hip replacement devices was recalled in August 2010.

Johnson & Johnson finally issued a recall on their faulty implants this year, amidst concerns over its products stretching back as far as 2006, but what is most concerning for Australian patients is research that shows its failure rate is higher than anywhere else in the world.

As well as failing us at times, health professionals do sometimes disagree, and some of the country's brightest medical minds are still at loggerheads over whether Lyme disease exists in Australia.

Seventeen-year-old Hannah Coleman was bitten by a tick carrying Lyme disease in Sydney three years ago. She has been crippled by the insidious disease ever since.

Despite her mother sending her blood to America, and the results coming back positive for Lyme disease, doctors here still don't recognise she has it.

A dedicated team is now working on a fresh independent study to determine whether Lyme disease is carried by Australian ticks. However the fear is that it will too late for any of those who were unlucky enough to be bitten.

The Van Dyk family also discovered that sometimes you have to look far and wide for a medical miracle to cure your child.

When their daughter Mila was still a baby, her parents noticed she favoured one side of her body. Doctors thought that she had had a stroke while still in the womb, and that the damage done to the right side of her brain affected Mila's movement on the left side of her body.

Doctors said that it was unlikely Mila would improve and that she would not be able to use the left side of her body properly. But her parents refused to give up, searching for cutting-edge developments in science. The found what they were looking for in the United States - a unique therapy which literally forces the brain to recognise previously unused parts of the body.

Like any parents, the Van Dykes dreamed of giving their daughter every chance to be her best, and thanks to the magic of modern medicine, they've been able to do just that.

Doctors thought that

This reporter is on Twitter at @PippaGardner7