"I can bend my fingers, which I could never do before,” she said. “Before they were getting misshapen, and now they're straight."

"I think it is an absolute miracle. It's worked wonders for me."

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Dr Russell Bennett is the inventor of that ‘special drink’ - Unique Water.

He's long boasted of its curative powers for anything from arthritis to asthma, and high blood pressure to migraines, and now after ten years, science and clinical trials indicate he may well be right.

"There's hundreds if not thousands of people out there who swear by it and call it all sorts of fancy names like ‘miracle’, ‘magic’, and ‘the fountain of youth’," he said.

"Unique Water is a mixture of water and magnesium bicarbonate so it tastes like water, but does so much more for you."

We were first introduced to Unique Water in 2002 when Dr Bennett had made a startling discovery, thanks to a herd of long-living cows and their water supply.

"They drank spring water and they lived 30 per cent to 50 per cent longer than other cows in Australia.

“We looked at everything, but water was all that was left at the end," he explained.

"When we looked we found it was very high in calcium and magnesium bicarbonates."

When Unique Water was launched onto the market it triggered a tsunami of criticism because the water had not undergone clinical trials, however now it has.

St Vincent’s Hospital supported the first official look at magnesium bicarbonate water in a double blind trial, using two groups of women - one group drinking Unique Water, the other spring water, and no one knowing just what they were drinking.

Dr Lyn Tozer from DataPharm was the project director. She's cautious but optimistic about what they found.

"We picked a population of relatively healthy post-menopausal women, just a small number as it was a proof of concept trial,” she explained.

"In the whole group there were some changes to bio-chemistry of the blood, and in the supplemented water group there was some slightly different changes. They were statistically significantly different."

The results showed magnesium bi-carbonated improved levels of a vital protein called albumin in the blood. It also had positive effects on the parathyroid hormone or P.T.H. - both of which are vital to a longer and better life.

"The parathyroid hormone is correlated with osteoarthritis, osteoporosis and atherosclerosis, which is the hardening of the arteries," Dr Bennett said.

“We're talking prevention if one drinks magnesium bicarbonate, also marketed as Unique Water, and we're also hopefully talking about a cure once more clinical trials are done."

The early indications suggest magnesium bicarbonate could help combat some of society's biggest killers, including heart disease and stroke, and also assist with arthritis.

"There was a brilliant survey done in the United States, with 1.7 million people, where it showed that those people with high albumin levels, high plasma albumin levels, lived longer and had a higher survival rate if they had serious diseases,” Dr Bennett explained. “Albumin is increased when you drink water with magnesium in it."

However Dr Lyn Tozer wants to see more Australian clinical trials conducted into specific illnesses, now that the doors been opened on magnesium bicarbonate in water.

"There simply have not been enough studies in large populations and certainly not among populations with a defined disorder."

After spending three years in the background organising the first clinical trials, Dr Beckett now feels vindicated. But this is just the first hurdle he’s successfully jumped, and he’ll be careful before ever again boasting of a magic bullet in a bottle.

"The potential is endless, it's a fantastic potential," he said. "And there's definitely, most definitely a need to utilise magnesium bicarbonate or Unique Water in further trials just to see how good it performs with people who are sick."