Deepak Chopra

• 1. Born In New Delhi

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  Deepak Chopra was born on the 22nd of October 1946 in New Delhi, British India. His father Krishan Lal Chopra served as a prominent cardiologist and held a lieutenant rank in the British army. The elder Chopra worked at the Moolchand Khairati Ram Hospital for over 25 years and advised Lord Mountbatten during his time as viceroy of India. Deepak attended St. Columba's School before graduating from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1969. He spent his early months practicing medicine in rural India where village lights would go out whenever it rained. This experience shaped his initial career path before he decided to emigrate to the United States in 1970. He traveled to Sri Lanka to take the medical licensing exam because the Indian government had banned its doctors from sitting for the test needed to practice in America. After passing, he arrived in Plainfield, New Jersey to begin a clinical internship at Muhlenberg Hospital. Between 1971 and 1977 he completed residencies in internal medicine at several institutions including the Lahey Clinic and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He earned his license to practice medicine in Massachusetts in 1973 and became board certified in endocrinology. By 1980 he had become chief of staff at the New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He taught at medical schools including Tufts University and Harvard University while establishing a private practice in Boston. The routine involved prescribing medication for patients who often suffered from chronic conditions. This conventional medical career would soon be interrupted by a personal crisis involving his own health habits. He was drinking black coffee by the hour and smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day. A visit to New Delhi in 1981 introduced him to the Ayurvedic physician Brihaspati Dev Triguna whose advice prompted him to begin investigating alternative practices. He took up Transcendental Meditation to help him stop smoking and continued to meditate for two hours every morning and half an hour in the evening. The shift from standard endocrinology to spiritual healing began in 1985 when he met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The leader of the Transcendental Meditation movement asked him to establish an Ayurvedic health center. Chopra resigned from his position at the New England Memorial Hospital shortly after this meeting. He left because he felt like a legalized drug pusher when all he did was prescribe medication. He believed that 80 percent of all drugs prescribed today were of optional or marginal benefit. This decision marked the beginning of his departure from conventional medicine and the start of a new business venture 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. TM lessons cost an additional $1,000. Celebrity patients included Elizabeth Taylor. In 1989 the Maharishi awarded him the title Dhanvantari of Heaven and Earth. That same year his book Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine was published. The publication of this book set the stage for a controversial career that would blend physics with spirituality. The next chapter of his life would take him to California where he would meet a global music icon and launch a media empire.

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• 2. The Oprah Breakthrough

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  In June 1993 Deepak Chopra moved to California as executive director of Sharp HealthCare's Institute for Human Potential and Mind/Body Medicine. The clinic was located in an exclusive resort in Del Mar, California that charged $4,000 per week. Michael Jackson's family were among the clients at this facility. 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. The move to California coincided with a massive surge in his public profile. On the 12th of July 1993 he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss his book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old. 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. This interview catapulted him from a regional medical director to a national celebrity. Four days after the interview the Maharishi National Council of the Age of Enlightenment wrote to Transcendental Meditation centers in the United States. They instructed them not to promote Chopra and his name and books were removed from the movement's literature and health centers. Neuroscientist Tony Nader became the movement's new Dhanvantari of Heaven and Earth. 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 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 that rival systems were being taught at lower prices. Chopra stated that he had become uncomfortable with what seemed like a cultish atmosphere around Maharishi. He also worried that his close association with the TM movement might prevent Ayurvedic medicine from being accepted as legitimate. 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. The Oprah interview had generated enough momentum for him to leave Sharp HealthCare when it changed ownership in 1996. He set up the Chopra Center for Wellbeing with neurologist David Simon at the Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, California. The center offered personalized advice about nutrition, sleep-wake cycles, and stress management based on mainstream medicine and Ayurveda. The business model relied on high fees and celebrity endorsements to build a lucrative brand. The financial success of this period would soon be challenged by legal battles involving the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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• 3. Quantum Claims And Criticism

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  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. He sees 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. This belief system led to the development of what he calls quantum healing. The term was defined in Quantum Healing (1989) as the ability of one mode of consciousness to spontaneously correct the mistakes in another mode of consciousness. This attempt wed the Maharishi's version of Ayurvedic medicine with concepts from physics. The ideas have regularly been criticized by medical and scientific professionals as pseudoscience. The criticism has been described as ranging from the dismissive to damning. Physicists have objected to his use of terms from quantum physics. For example, he was awarded the satirical Ig Nobel Prize in physics in 1998 for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has said that Chopra uses quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus. His discussions of quantum healing have been characterized as technobabble by those proficient in physics. Chopra's treatments generally elicit nothing but a placebo response. They have drawn criticism that the unwarranted claims made for them may raise false hope and lure sick people away from legitimate medical treatments. Physics professor Robert L. Park has written that physicists wince at the New Age quackery in Chopra's cancer theories. He characterizes them as a cruel fiction since adopting them in place of effective treatment risks compounding the ill effects of the disease with guilt. In 2001 ABC News aired a show segment on the topic of distance healing and prayer. Chopra said there is a realm of reality that goes beyond the physical where in fact we can influence each other from a distance. He was shown using his claimed mental powers in an attempt to relax a person in another room. After the show a poll of its viewers found that 90% of them believed in distance healing. Health and science journalist Christopher Wanjek has criticized the experiment saying that any correspondence evident from the charts would prove nothing but that even so, freezing the frame of the video shows the correspondences are not so close as claimed. The broadcast was characterized as an instructive example of how bad medicine is presented as exciting news. The scientific community continues to reject his claims while his popularity grows. The next phase of his career would involve significant legal challenges regarding financial transparency and copyright.

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• 4. Legal Battles And Defamation

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  In May 1991 the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article by Chopra and two others on Ayurvedic medicine and TM. JAMA subsequently published an erratum stating that the lead author, Hari M. Sharma, had undisclosed financial interests. This was followed by an article by JAMA associate editor Andrew A. Skolnick which was highly critical of Chopra and the other authors for failing to disclose their financial connections to the article subject. Several experts on meditation and traditional Indian medicine criticized JAMA for accepting the shoddy science of the original article. Chopra and two TM groups sued Skolnick and JAMA for defamation, asking for $194 million in damages. The case was dismissed in March 1993. This legal battle highlighted the tension between his alternative medicine claims and established medical journals. After Chopra published his book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind in 1993 he was sued for copyright infringement by Robert Sapolsky. The lawsuit claimed he had used without proper attribution five passages of text and one table displaying information on the endocrinology of stress. An out-of-court settlement resulted in Chopra correctly attributing material that was researched by Sapolsky. These legal disputes underscored the controversy surrounding his financial disclosures and the accuracy of his scientific claims. The JAMA article had exposed a lack of transparency regarding financial interests which led to the defamation suit. The copyright suit demonstrated that even his academic credentials were subject to scrutiny. Despite these legal setbacks, Chopra continued to build his business empire. He founded the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine and Maharishi AyurVeda Products International though he later distanced himself from these organizations. In 2004 he received his California medical license and was affiliated with Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, California. The legal battles did not stop him from expanding his reach into other sectors of the economy. He joined the board of advisors for tech startup State.com in 2012. In 2014 he founded ISHAR (Integrative Studies Historical Archive and Repository). In 2015 he partnered with businessman Paul Tudor Jones II to found JUST Capital, a non-profit firm which ranks companies in terms of just business practices. The financial success of his books and lectures would soon be quantified by analysts.

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• 5. Business Empire And Wealth

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  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. In his 2013 book Do You Believe in Magic? Paul Offit writes that Chopra's business grossed approximately $20 million annually. The business was built on the sale of various alternative medicine products such as herbal supplements, massage oils, books, videos and courses. A year's worth of products for anti-aging can cost up to $10,000. Chopra himself was estimated to be worth over $80 million according to Srinivas Aravamudan. He was able to charge $25,000 to $30,000 per lecture five or six times a month. Medical anthropologist Hans Baer said Chopra was an example of a successful entrepreneur but that he focused too much on serving the upper-class through an alternative to medical hegemony. Robert Todd Carroll writes of Chopra charging $25,000 per lecture performance where he spouts a few platitudes and gives spiritual advice while warning against the ill effects of materialism. According to publishers HarperCollins, Chopra has written more than 80 books which have been translated into more than 43 languages. His book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success was on The New York Times Best Seller list for 72 weeks. He serves as an adjunct professor in the marketing division at Columbia Business School. He serves as adjunct professor of executive programs at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He participates annually as a lecturer at the Update in Internal Medicine event sponsored by Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In 2016 Chopra was promoted from voluntary assistant clinical professor to voluntary full clinical professor at the University of California, San Diego in their Department of Family Medicine and Public Health. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. In 2005 he was appointed as a senior scientist at The Gallup Organization. In 2006 he launched Virgin Comics with his son Gotham Chopra and entrepreneur Richard Branson. In 2009 he founded a tax-exempt 501(c) organization that raises funds to promote and research alternative health. The Foundation sponsors annual Sages and Scientists conferences. He sits on the board of advisors of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association. In July 2023 Chopra and the Foundation co-hosted an event entitled We the Future alongside Kenneth Cole. It explored the future of AI and supported guiding AI from the outset to create positive disruption. The event featured as speakers real estate investor Craig Hatkoff on AI's application to innovation, disability rights activist Eddie Ndopu on AI and accessibility, astronaut Sian Proctor on AI and space, record producer Jerry Wonda on AI and music, and model and actress Gabriella Wright on AI and well-being. The financial success of his brand has made him one of the wealthiest figures in alternative medicine. The legacy of his work continues to generate debate about the role of pseudoscience in modern culture.

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