Deepak Chopra

• 1. Introduction

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  Deepak Chopra sold 137,000 copies of one book within 24 hours of appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show in July 1993. That figure comes from the physician and author Paul Offit, who adds that sales reached 400,000 by the end of the week.

  Chopra was born on the 22nd of October 1946 and trained as a doctor in India. He went on to become one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine. Admirers see a gifted popularizer of wellbeing. Critics in medicine and physics call his ideas pseudoscience.

  How did a Massachusetts hospital chief of staff become a household name? What does he teach, and why do scientists keep arguing with him?

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• 2. A Doctor From Delhi

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  Chopra was born in New Delhi, British India, to Punjabi Hindu parents named Krishan Lal and Pushpa Chopra. His father was a prominent cardiologist who led the department of medicine and cardiology at Moolchand Khairati Ram Hospital for more than 25 years. As a lieutenant in the British army, the elder Chopra served as an army doctor at the front in Burma and advised Lord Mountbatten, the viceroy of India. Chopra's paternal grandfather had been a sergeant in the British Indian Army, and his younger brother Sanjiv later became a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

  The young Chopra attended St. Columba's School in New Delhi and graduated from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1969. He spent his first months as a doctor in rural India, including six months in a village where the lights went out whenever it rained. That early work drew him toward endocrinology, and especially neuroendocrinology, in search of a biological basis for how thoughts and emotions affect the body.

  In 1970 he married in India and emigrated to the United States with his wife. The Indian government had banned its doctors from sitting for the American licensing exam, so he travelled to Sri Lanka to take it. After he passed, he began a clinical internship at Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield, New Jersey, which was recruiting overseas doctors to replace those serving in Vietnam.

  Between 1971 and 1977 he completed residencies in internal medicine at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts, and at three Boston institutions. Those were the VA Medical Center, St Elizabeth's Medical Center, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He earned his Massachusetts medical license in 1973 and became board certified in internal medicine, specializing in endocrinology. By 1977 he held the credentials of a mainstream specialist, and Boston's medical schools were about to put them to use.

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• 3. The Maharishi Years

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  Tufts University, Boston University, and Harvard University all employed Chopra as a teacher at their medical schools. He also became chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts, which was later renamed the Boston Regional Medical Center. After that he opened a private endocrinology practice in Boston.

  A visit to New Delhi in 1981 brought him to Brihaspati Dev Triguna, an Ayurvedic physician who headed the Indian Council for Ayurvedic Medicine. Triguna's advice prompted Chopra to start investigating Ayurvedic practices. At that point, Chopra says, he was drinking black coffee by the hour and smoking at least a pack of cigarettes every day. He took up Transcendental Meditation to quit, and he kept meditating for two hours each morning and half an hour each evening.

  In 1985 that practice led to a meeting with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the leader of the Transcendental Meditation movement. The Maharishi asked him to establish an Ayurvedic health center, and Chopra left his hospital post. He later gave one reason for leaving: "When 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."

  At the Maharishi Ayur-Veda Health Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts, Chopra served as medical director. Guests paid between $2,850 and $3,950 per week for Ayurvedic cleansing rituals such as massages, enemas, and oil baths. Lessons in Transcendental Meditation cost another $1,000, and Elizabeth Taylor was among the celebrity patients. Chopra also became the founding president of the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine and a founder of Maharishi Ayur-Veda Products International. He later distanced himself from both organizations.

  In 1989 the Maharishi gave him the title "Dhanvantari of Heaven and Earth," named for the Hindu physician to the gods. That same year Chopra published Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Perfect Health: The Complete Mind/Body Guide followed in 1990.

  In May 1991 the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article by Chopra and two others on Ayurvedic medicine and Transcendental Meditation. The journal later printed an erratum saying that the lead author, Hari M. Sharma, had undisclosed financial interests. Associate editor Andrew A. Skolnick then wrote a piece sharply criticizing the authors for hiding their financial ties to the subject. Several experts on meditation and traditional Indian medicine, for their part, faulted the journal for accepting the "shoddy science" of the original paper.

  Chopra and two meditation groups sued Skolnick and the journal for defamation, asking for $194 million in damages. The case was dismissed in March 1993, just before Chopra's ties to the movement began to unravel.

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• 4. California And Oprah

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  In June 1993 Chopra moved to California as executive director of Sharp HealthCare's Institute for Human Potential and Mind/Body Medicine. He also headed its Center for Mind/Body Medicine, a clinic in an exclusive resort in Del Mar that charged $4,000 per week. Michael Jackson's family counted among its clients.

  Chopra had met Jackson in 1988, and the two stayed friends for 20 years. Jackson died in 2009 after being given prescription drugs. Chopra said he hoped the death would be a call to action against the "cult of drug-pushing doctors, with their co-dependent relationships with addicted celebrities."

  Chopra's 1993 book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old, together with his friendship with Jackson, earned him the invitation to appear on Oprah. Four days after the broadcast, the Maharishi National Council of the Age of Enlightenment wrote to Transcendental Meditation centers across the United States. The letter told them not to promote Chopra, and his name and books were removed from the movement's literature and health centers. The neuroscientist Tony Nader became the new "Dhanvantari of Heaven and Earth."

  Accounts of why Chopra left the movement differ. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi claimed that Chopra had competed for the position of guru, which Chopra rejected. Robert Todd Carroll writes that Chopra left because the organization had become stressful and a hindrance to his success. Cynthia Ann Humes writes that the Maharishi worried about rival systems being taught at lower prices. Chopra himself feared that close ties to the movement might keep Ayurvedic medicine from being taken seriously, especially after the trouble over the journal article. He also said he had grown uncomfortable with a "cultish atmosphere around Maharishi."

  Robert Sapolsky sued Chopra for copyright infringement after Ageless Body, Timeless Mind appeared. Sapolsky said Chopra had used "five passages of text and one table" on the endocrinology of stress without proper attribution. An out-of-court settlement ended with Chopra correctly crediting the material Sapolsky had researched.

  In 1995 Chopra was not licensed to practice medicine in California, where he ran his clinic. He did not see patients at the clinic "as a doctor" during that period. He received his California medical license in 2004 and became affiliated with Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla.

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• 5. Building A Wellbeing Brand

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  Sharp HealthCare changed ownership in 1996, and Chopra left to cofound the Chopra Center for Wellbeing with the neurologist David Simon. The center operated at the Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, California. Chopra owns and supervises its Mind-Body Medical Group, which offers standard treatment alongside advice on nutrition, sleep-wake cycles, and stress management. The Carlsbad center has since closed, after Chopra sold Chopra Global to the Healing Company in 2023 and became its chief scientific adviser.

  In his 2013 book Do You Believe in Magic?, Paul Offit estimated that the business grossed about $20 million a year. Sales came from herbal supplements, massage oils, books, videos, and courses, and a year of anti-aging products could cost up to $10,000. Chopra himself was estimated to be worth more than $80 million. According to Srinivas Aravamudan, he could charge $25,000 to $30,000 per lecture, five or six times a month.

  The medical anthropologist Hans Baer called Chopra a successful entrepreneur but argued that he served the upper class instead of offering a truly holistic approach to health. Robert Carroll describes the lectures as "giving spiritual advice while warning against the ill effects of materialism."

  Chopra has sat on the board of the clothing retailer Men's Wearhouse since 2004. In 2005 he was appointed a senior scientist at The Gallup Organization, and in 2006 he launched Virgin Comics with his son Gotham Chopra and the entrepreneur Richard Branson. He joined the advisory board of the tech startup State.com in 2012 and founded ISHAR, the Integrative Studies Historical Archive and Repository, in 2014. In 2015 he partnered with the businessman Paul Tudor Jones II to found JUST Capital, a nonprofit that ranks companies on just business practices.

  At Columbia Business School, Chopra serves as an adjunct professor in the marketing division. He also holds an adjunct professorship in executive programs at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Each year he lectures at the Update in Internal Medicine event sponsored by Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In 2016 the University of California, San Diego promoted him from voluntary assistant clinical professor to voluntary full clinical professor in family medicine and public health.

  Chopra and his wife have two adult children, Gotham and Mallika, and three grandchildren. He lives in a "health-centric" condominium in Manhattan. In July 2006 he was named to the inaugural class of the Great Immigrants Award from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

  In 2009 Chopra founded a tax-exempt foundation that raises money to promote and research alternative health. It sponsors annual Sages and Scientists conferences. In July 2023 the foundation co-hosted an event called "We the Future" with Kenneth Cole, exploring how to guide artificial intelligence toward peace from the outset. Speakers included the astronaut Sian Proctor, the disability rights activist Eddie Ndopu, and the record producer Jerry Wonda.

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• 6. Quantum Healing

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  The 1989 book Quantum Healing defined its title idea as the "ability of one mode of consciousness (the mind) to spontaneously correct the mistakes in another mode of consciousness (the body)." Chopra coined the phrase to suggest that a health imbalance can be corrected by quantum mechanical means. The cultural historian Kenneth Zysk called the result "New Age Ayurveda," a marriage of the Maharishi's version of Ayurveda with ideas from physics. Early editions of the book acknowledged the Maharishi's influence and recommended his books, but later editions removed every mention of him.

  Chopra says that a person can reach "perfect health," a condition "that is free from disease, that never feels pain," and "that cannot age or die." He describes the body as undergirded by a "quantum mechanical body" made of energy and information. In his view, "human aging is fluid and changeable; it can speed up, slow down, stop for a time, and even reverse itself," depending on one's state of mind. He has said he expects "to live way beyond 100," and he calls ageing "simply learned behaviour." Robert Todd Carroll characterized this message as the selling of false hope.

  On cancer, Chopra has compared spontaneous remission to a change in quantum state, a jump to "a new level of consciousness that prohibits the existence of cancer." The physics professor Robert L. Park wrote that physicists "wince" at this "New Age quackery." He called it a cruel fiction, because adopting it in place of effective treatment could add guilt to illness and close off a genuine cure.

  The physicist Sadri Hassani writes that "few people have distorted and defaced quantum physics more" than Chopra. The core objection concerns scale. Macroscopic objects are too large to show quantum properties such as interference and wave function collapse, so critics describe the link to medicine as a "systematic misinterpretation" of physics. Richard Dawkins said Chopra uses "quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus."

  Physics professor Chad Orzel said that to a physicist, talk of "energy fields" and "congealing quantum soup" is utter gibberish. He added that Chopra includes enough technical vocabulary to persuade non-scientists that he understands physics.

  In 1998 Chopra received the satirical Ig Nobel Prize in physics for "his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness." In 2007 Dawkins interviewed him for the Channel 4 documentary The Enemies of Reason. There Chopra said he used the term as a metaphor that had little to do with quantum theory in physics. A 2015 paper on pseudo-profound nonsense later used his Twitter feed as its canonical example, comparing it with fake Chopra quotes from a spoof website.

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• 7. Mind, Universe, God

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  Chopra describes himself as a philosophical idealist who argues that consciousness comes before matter. He holds that mind, which he calls "dynamically active consciousness," is a fundamental feature of the universe. In his telling, humans are not "physical machines that have somehow learned to think...but thoughts that have learned to create a physical machine." He writes that "We are the eyes of the universe looking at itself."

  One remark has drawn particular attention. He has been quoted as saying: "Charles Darwin was wrong. Consciousness is key to evolution and we will soon prove that." He opposes reductionism, noting that the body can be traced down to the molecular level with no explanation for beliefs, desires, memory, or creativity. In Quantum Healing he concluded that quantum entanglement links everything and therefore must create consciousness. Scientists dispute this, since quantum effects do not govern large systems such as the brain.

  The neurotransmitters dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin anchor Chopra's account of how mind and body connect. He argues that every thought, feeling, perception, and memory is physically represented elsewhere in the body. He says that biology, relationships, and environment are "all inextricably woven into a single process," so that by influencing one, "you influence everything."

  Physicians at the Chopra Center practice integrative medicine, combining conventional Western care with yoga, mindfulness meditation, and Ayurveda. Ayurveda holds that illness comes from an imbalance in the doshas, or humors, and treats it with diet, exercise, and meditative practice. According to the medical evidence, nothing in Ayurvedic medicine is known to be effective against disease, and some preparations may cause harm. Meditation, however, may help general well-being.

  Chopra likens the universe to a "reality sandwich" with three layers. The first is the material world, the second a "quantum" zone of matter and energy, and the third a "virtual" zone outside time and space. The third is the domain of God, who can direct the other layers from there. He writes that human brains are "hardwired to know God," and he credits the speaker and writer Jiddu Krishnamurti as an inspiration.

  In 2012 the physics professor Mark Alford reviewed War of the Worldviews, a book Chopra co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow. Alford found the book's two-sided debate a false opposition. In his view, the counterpoint to Chopra's speculations is not science but Occam's razor.

  In March 2010 Chopra and Jean Houston faced Sam Harris and Michael Shermer at the California Institute of Technology. The question was "Does God Have a Future?" Harris argued that Chopra's "spooky physics" merges two language games in a "completely unprincipled way." Shermer, who had already criticized Chopra's 2005 articles on the creation-evolution controversy and intelligent design, called him "the very definition of what we mean by pseudoscience."

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• 8. Critics And Admirers

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  In 2000 Chopra wrote that his AIDS patients combined mainstream medicine with Ayurvedic practices such as herbs, meditation, and yoga. He acknowledges that HIV causes AIDS but says the DNA, "hearing" the virus nearby, mistakes it for a friendly sound. Ayurveda uses vibrations said to correct that distortion. Medical professor Lawrence Schneiderman wrote that the program has, "to put it mildly...no supporting empirical data."

  In 2001 ABC News aired a segment on distance healing and prayer. Chopra said on camera, "There is a realm of reality that goes beyond the physical where in fact we can influence each other from a distance." He tried to relax a person in another room, whose vital signs were charted to show a match with his periods of concentration. A viewer poll afterward found that 90% believed in distance healing. The journalist Christopher Wanjek replied that freezing the video frame shows the correspondence is not as close as claimed.

  Chopra himself says that "The placebo effect is real medicine, because it triggers the body's healing system." The physician Harriet Hall, a former U.S. Air Force flight surgeon, warned that Ayurveda "can be dangerous." She cited studies showing that 64% of Ayurvedic remedies sold in India contained significant heavy metals such as mercury, arsenic, and cadmium. A 2015 study of users in the United States found elevated blood lead levels in 40% of those tested.

  In 2013 Chopra published an article accusing a "stubborn band of militant skeptics" of editing online reference articles to block fair treatment of figures such as Rupert Sheldrake. The biologist Jerry Coyne replied that it was Chopra who lost out, as his views were exposed as scientific-sounding psychobabble. Chopra also wrote in The Huffington Post that "No skeptic, to my knowledge, ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others." The astronomer Phil Plait named Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, and Edward Jenner as counterexamples.

  In April 2010 Aseem Shukla, co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation, criticized Chopra for suggesting that yoga began in an older Indian spiritual tradition rather than in Hinduism. Chopra answered that yoga is rooted in "consciousness alone," as expounded by Vedic rishis long before historic Hinduism arose. He said Shukla had a "fundamentalist agenda." Shukla replied that Chopra was an exponent of "How to Deconstruct, Repackage and Sell Hindu Philosophy Without Calling it Hindu!"

  In 1999 Time magazine put Chopra on its list of the 20th century's heroes and icons, and it later called him "the poet-prophet of alternative medicine." Writing in 2008, Ptolemy Tompkins said Chopra had been a "magnet for criticism" yet remained "beloved," with messages of "love, health and happiness." Cosmo Landesman called him "the David Beckham of personal/spiritual growth" in 2005. David Gorski placed him among the "quacks" and "cranks," and Timothy Caulfield called him "a fountain of meaningless jargon." The New York Times argued that his publishers use the medical degree on his book covers to buttress his claims.

  Documents from the Epstein files record multiple meetings and email exchanges between Chopra and Jeffrey Epstein. Chopra has denied any wrongdoing.

  HarperCollins says Chopra has written more than 80 books, translated into more than 43 languages. The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success alone spent 72 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list.

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