The treatment for brittle bones at California Pacific Orthopaedic & Sports Medicine begins in the waiting room. Patients can grab a bottle of Osteo fruit tea and guzzle half their daily dose of calcium. The inventor and owner of Osteo is Dr. Jon Dickinson, 50, a partner in the medical practice.

"Osteoporosis is a silent disease characterized by low bone mass. In most cases, it doesn't give any symptoms until you fall and break a bone. Being an orthopedic surgeon, I deal with osteoporosis mostly through fractures. Whenever you see a little old lady with a hump on her back it is most likely because she has osteoporosis and she's had a mild series of compression fractions over the years to cause her spine to become deformed.

Ninety percent of girls, and 80 percent of boys 12 to 19 don't get the recommended daily allowance of calcium in their diet. When you don't get the calcium in your diet, your body takes it out of your bones. It's like filling up a gas tank. So it's very important as teenagers to drink your milk, which is the most common form of calcium.

From 21 on, you start losing calcium. There are a significant number of people who are milk-allergic, and with the increase in the consumption of soft drinks by teenagers, milk consumption in the United States has plummeted.

Seeing fractures and realizing what a huge problem osteoporosis is, I felt that it would be beneficial to provide calcium in a way where people could take it, not necessarily in pill form. There is a significant amount of people who do not like to take pills. I worked out some formulations. Osteo was put on the back burner for several years. Maybe a couple of times a year I'd get the stuff out and work on it. Last year I decided I was either going to do this or forget about it.

The key was increasing the solubility of calcium. If something is insoluble, it will settle out at the bottom of the glass. If it is soluble it stays suspended in solution. If you look at a bottle of Osteo you won't see any white residue at the bottom. We figured out a way of suspending it in solution.

This is the first drink that is designed specifically for bone health. I've put magnesium, folate, boron and vitamins B6 and B12 in. All have been shown to be promote bone formation. Osteo is 500 milligrams of calcium per 12-ounce bottle. The U.S. recommended daily allowance for adults is about 1,200 milligrams of calcium a day, so we give you roughly half. We have three flavors. I like lemon berry the best. It's lemon juice with cranberry, strawberry and raspberry.

It retails for approximately $2.25 a bottle. It comes in a 12-pack case. We're going to start small. This summer it's in Roberts of Woodside. I was a bag boy there. It's in Woodlands Market in Kentfield and Paradise Foods up in Corte Madera. (For other locations visit www.osteobev. com.) We're coming out with a second product, which is going to be geared toward youth. It's a calcium energy drink called Osteoblast, in a 16-ounce bottle.

It's been eight years and I've been crossing my fingers and kind of amazed that nobody has come out with a product like this yet. The name of the company is Osteoblast Beverages. An osteoblast is the cell in your body that makes bone. The bottle has the address of my post office box in Ross. That's company headquarters.