The best medical innovations for next year include an almond-size device that's implanted in the mouth to relieve severe headaches and a hand-held scanner resembling a blow dryer that detects skin cancer, the Cleveland Clinic said on Wednesday.
The clinic's annual list of the best medical innovations for 2013 also includes new drugs to treat advanced prostate cancer and better mammography technology.
But leading the 2013 list for innovations is an old procedure that has a new use due to findings in a recent study. Physicians and researchers at the clinic voted weight-loss surgery as the top medical innovation, not for its effectiveness in reducing obesity, but for its ability to control Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease.
Over the years, bariatric surgeons noticed that the procedure would often rid obese patients of Type 2 diabetes, before they even left the hospital.
