Deepak Chopra (; ; born October 22, 1946) is an American author, New Age guru, and alternative medicine advocate. A prominent figure in the New Age movement, his books and videos have made him one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine. In the 1990s, Chopra, a physician by education, became a popular proponent of a pseudoscientific approach to well-being that includes yoga, meditation, and nutrition, among other New Age therapies.
Chopra studied medicine in India before emigrating in 1970 to the United States, where he completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in endocrinology. As a licensed physician, in 1980, he became chief of staff at the New England Memorial Hospital (NEMH). In 1985, he met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and became involved in the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement. Shortly thereafter, Chopra resigned from his position at NEMH to establish the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center. In 1993, Chopra gained a following after he was interviewed about his books on The Oprah Winfrey Show. He then left the TM movement to become the executive director of Sharp HealthCare's Center for Mind-Body Medicine. In 1996, he cofounded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing.
Chopra claims that a person may attain "perfect health", a condition "that is free from disease, that never feels pain", and "that cannot age or die". Seeing the human body as undergirded by a "quantum mechanical body" composed not of matter but energy and information, he believes that "human aging is fluid and changeable; it can speed up, slow down, stop for a time, and even reverse itself", as determined by one's state of mind. He claims that his practices can also treat chronic disease.
The ideas Chopra promotes have regularly been criticized by medical and scientific professionals as pseudoscience. The criticism has been described as ranging "from the dismissive to...damning". Philosopher Robert Carroll writes that Chopra, to justify his teachings, attempts to integrate Ayurveda with quantum mechanics. Chopra says that what he calls "quantum healing" cures any manner of ailments, including cancer, through effects that he claims are literally based on the same principles as quantum mechanics. This has led physicists to object to his use of the term "quantum" in reference to medical conditions and the human body. His discussions of quantum healing have been characterized as technobabble – "incoherent babbling strewn with scientific terms" by those proficient in physics. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has said that Chopra uses "quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus". Chopra's treatments generally elicit nothing but a placebo response, and they have drawn criticism that the unwarranted claims made for them may raise "false hope" and lure sick people away from legitimate medical treatments.
Biography Early life and education Chopra was born in New Delhi, British India to Punjabi Hindu parents Krishan Lal Chopra (1919–2001) and Pushpa Chopra. His paternal grandfather was a sergeant in the British Indian Army. His father was a prominent cardiologist, head of the department of medicine and cardiology at New Delhi's Moolchand Khairati Ram Hospital for over 25 years, and was also a lieutenant in the British army, serving as an army doctor at the front at Burma and acting as a medical adviser to Lord Mountbatten, viceroy of India.; , Chopra's younger brother, Sanjiv Chopra, was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and on staff at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center."Chopra, Sanjiv, MD" , Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Retrieved May 15, 2014.
Chopra studied at St. Columba's School in New Delhi and graduated from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, in 1969. He spent his first months as a doctor working in rural India, including, he writes, six months in a village where the lights went out whenever it rained.Deepak Chopra, Return of the Rishi, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991, p. 1. It was during his early career that he was drawn to study endocrinology, particularly neuroendocrinology, to find a biological basis for the influence of thoughts and emotions.
He married in India in 1970 before emigrating, with his wife, to the United States that same year. The Indian government had banned its doctors from sitting for the exam needed to practice in the United States. Consequently, Chopra had to travel to Sri Lanka to take it. After passing, he arrived in the United States to take up a clinical internship at Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield, New Jersey, where doctors from overseas were being recruited to replace those serving in Vietnam.Chopra 1991, p. 57; Deepak Chopra, "Special Keynote with Dr. Deepak Chopra", November 2013, from 2:50 mins; Richard Knox, "Foreign doctors: a US dilemma", The Boston Globe, June 30, 1974.
Between 1971 and 1977, he completed residencies in internal medicine at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts, the VA Medical Center, St Elizabeth's Medical Center, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston."Dr. Deepak K Chopra" , U.S. News & World Report. He earned his license to practice medicine in the state of Massachusetts in 1973, becoming board certified in internal medicine, specializing in endocrinology."Deepak K. Chopra, M.D." , Commonwealth of Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine; "Verify a Physician's Certification" , American Board of Internal Medicine.
East Coast years Chopra taught at the medical schools of Tufts University, Boston University, and Harvard University, and became Chief of Staff at the New England Memorial Hospital (NEMH) (later known as the Boston Regional Medical Center) in Stoneham, Massachusetts before establishing a private practice in Boston in endocrinology.
While visiting New Delhi in 1981, he met the Ayurvedic physician Brihaspati Dev Triguna, head of the Indian Council for Ayurvedic Medicine, whose advice prompted him to begin investigating Ayurvedic practices.Chopra 1991, p. 105ff. Chopra was "drinking black coffee by the hour and smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day".Chopra 1991, p. 125. He took up Transcendental Meditation to help him stop and, , he continued to meditate for two hours every morning and half an hour in the evening.
Chopra's involvement with TM led to a meeting in 1985 with the leader of the TM movement, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who asked him to establish an Ayurvedic health center.Chopra 1991, p. 139ff He left his position at the NEMH. Chopra said that one of the reasons he left was his disenchantment at having to prescribe too many drugs: "[W]hen all you do is prescribe medication, you start to feel like a legalized drug pusher. That doesn't mean that all prescriptions are useless, but it is true that 80 percent of all drugs prescribed today are of optional or marginal benefit."Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, "The Crisis of Perception", Media Monitors Network, February 29, 2008.
He became the founding president of the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine, one of the founders of Maharishi Ayur-Veda Products International, and medical director of the Maharishi Ayur-Veda Health Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts. The center charged between $2,850 and $3,950 per week for Ayurvedic cleansing rituals such as massages, enemas, and oil baths, and TM lessons cost an additional $1,000. Celebrity patients included Elizabeth Taylor. Also see Deepak Chopra, "Letters: Deepak responds", New York, September 25, 1995, p. 16. Chopra also became one of the TM movement's spokespeople. In 1989, the Maharishi awarded him the title "Dhanvantari of Heaven and Earth" (Dhanvantari was the Hindu physician to the gods).. Also see That year Chopra's Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine was published, followed by Perfect Health: The Complete Mind/Body Guide (1990).
West Coast years In June 1993, he moved to California as executive director of Sharp HealthCare's Institute for Human Potential and Mind/Body Medicine, and head of their Center for Mind/Body Medicine, a clinic in an exclusive resort in Del Mar, California, that charged $4,000 per week and included Michael Jackson's family among its clients. Chopra and Jackson first met in 1988 and remained friends for 20 years. When Jackson died in 2009 after being administered prescription drugs, Chopra said he hoped it would be a call to action against the "cult of drug-pushing doctors, with their co-dependent relationships with addicted celebrities"."A Tribute to My Friend, Michael Jackson" by Deepak Chopra, The Huffington Post, June 26, 2009Gerald Posner, "Deepak Chopra: How Michael Jackson Could Have Been Saved", The Daily Beast, July 2, 2009, p. 4.
Chopra left the Transcendental Meditation movement around the time he moved to California in January 1993. Mahesh Yogi claimed that Chopra had competed for the Maharishi's position as guru,Deepak Chopra, "The Maharishi Years – The Untold Story: Recollections of a Former Disciple", The Huffington Post, February 13, 2008. although Chopra rejected this. According to Robert Todd Carroll, Chopra left the TM organization when it "became too stressful" and was a "hindrance to his success". Cynthia Ann Humes writes that the Maharishi was concerned, and not only with regard to Chopra, that rival systems were being taught at lower prices.; Chopra, for his part, was worried that his close association with the TM movement might prevent Ayurvedic medicine from being accepted as legitimate, particularly after the problems with the JAMA article. He also stated that he had become uncomfortable with what seemed like a "cultish atmosphere around Maharishi".
In 1995, Chopra was not licensed to practice medicine in California where he had a clinic. However, he did not see patients at this clinic "as a doctor" during this time. In 2004, he received his California medical license, and was affiliated with Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, California."Chopra, Deepak" , California Department of Consumer Affairs. Retrieved March 23, 2016."Dr. Deepak K Chopra" , U.S. News & World Report. Retrieved March 23, 2016."Endocrinologists, Scripps La Jolla Hospitals and Clinics", U.S. News & World Report. Chopra is the owner and supervisor of the Mind-Body Medical Group within the Chopra Center, which in addition to standard medical treatment offers personalized advice about nutrition, sleep-wake cycles, and stress management based on mainstream medicine and Ayurveda.Deepak Chopra, "The Mind–Body Medical Group at the Chopra Center", The Chopra Well, May 26, 2014. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists.
Alternative medicine business Chopra's book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old was published in 1993. The book and his friendship with Michael Jackson gained him an interview on July 12 that year on Oprah. Paul Offit writes that within 24 hours Chopra had sold 137,000 copies of his book and 400,000 by the end of the week.Paul A. Offit, Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine, HarperCollins, 2013, p. 39; "Full Transcript: Your Call with Dr Deepak Chopra" , NDTV, January 23, 2012; also see Craig Bromberg, "Doc of Ages", People, November 15, 1993. Four days after the interview, the Maharishi National Council of the Age of Enlightenment wrote to TM centers in the United States, instructing them not to promote Chopra, and his name and books were removed from the movement's literature and health centers.For the National Council's letter, ; ; for the rest, Neuroscientist Tony Nader became the movement's new "Dhanvantari of Heaven and Earth".