Deepak Chopra (Author) Deepak Chopra is an American author, public speaker, alternative medicine advocate, and a prominent figure in the New Age movement. Through his books and videos, he has become one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine. Chopra studied medicine in India before emigrating to the United States in 1970 where he completed residencies in internal medicine and endocrinology. As a licensed physician, he became chief of staff at the New England Memorial Hospital (NEMH) in 1980. He met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1985 and became involved with the Transcendental Meditation movement (TM). He resigned his position at NEMH shortly thereafter to establish the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center. Chopra gained a following in 1993 after his interview on the The Oprah Winfrey Show regarding his books. He then left the TM movement to become the executive director of Sharp HealthCare's Center for Mind-Body Medicine and in 1996 he co-founded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing. Chopra believes 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 being undergirded by a "quantum mechanical body" composed not of matter but of 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. As of 2014, Deepak Chopra lived in a "health-centric" condominium in Manhattan. The ideas Chopra promotes have been regularly criticized by medical and scientific professionals as pseudoscience. This criticism has been described as ranging "from dismissive [to] damning". For example, Robert Carroll states Chopra attempts to integrate Ayurveda with quantum mechanics to justify his teachings. Chopra argues 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 treatments benefit from the placebo response, and some argue that his claims for the effectiveness of alternative medicine can lure sick people away from medical treatments. He is placed by David Gorski among the "quacks", "cranks" and "purveyors of woo", and described as "arrogantly obstinate". Richard Dawkins publicly exposed Chopra, accusing him of using "quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus".
Top 10 Deepak Chopra Quotes
Fear is the memory of pain. Addiction is the memory of pleasure. Freedom is beyond both.
The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.
Know that people are doing the best they can from their level of awareness. Accept people for who they are and always be ready to forgive.
You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology.
The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.
The universe has no restrictions. You place restrictions on the universe with your expectations.
Religion is belief in someone else's experience. Spirituality is having your own experience.
We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.
You must find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible.
Every person is a God in embryo. Its only desire is to be born.
Chopra was born in New Delhi, India, to 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; he 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. As of 2014 Chopra's younger brother, Sanjiv Chopra, is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and on staff at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Chopra completed his primary education at 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 working in rural India, including, he writes, six months in a village where the lights went out whenever it rained. 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 that year to the United States. The Indian government had banned its doctors from sitting the American Medical Association exam needed to practice in the USA, so 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.
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. He earned his license to practice medicine in the state of Massachusetts in 1973, becoming board certified in internal medicine, specializing in endocrinology.
Chopra's 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, which made him a household name. 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. 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. Neuroscientist Tony Nader became the movement's new "Dhanvantari of Heaven and Earth".
Sharp HealthCare changed ownership in 1996 and Chopra left to set up the Chopra Center for Wellbeing with neurologist David Simon, now located at the Omni La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California. In his 2013 book Do You Believe in Magic?, Paul Offit writes that Chopra's business grosses approximately $20 million annually, and is 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-ageing" can cost up to $10,000, Offit wrote. Chopra himself is estimated to be worth over $80 million as of 2014. As of 2005, 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, rather than a truly holistic approach to health.
Chopra 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. Robert Carroll writes of Chopra charging $25,000 per lecture, "giving spiritual advice while warning against the ill effects of materialism".
In 2015, Chopra partnered with businessman Paul Tudor Jones II to found JUST Capital, a non-profit which ranks companies in terms of just business practices in an effort to promote economic justice. In 2014 Chopra founded ISHAR (Integrative Studies Historical Archive and Repository). In 2012, Chopra joined the board of advisors for tech startup State.com, creating a browsable network of structured opinions. In 2009 Chopra founded the Chopra Foundation, 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. Chopra founded the American Association for Ayurvedic Medicine (AAAM) and Maharishi AyurVeda Products International, though he later distanced himself from these organizations. In 2005 Chopra was appointed as a senior scientist at The Gallup Organization. Since 2004 he has been a board member of Men's Wearhouse, a men's clothing distributor. In 2006 he launched Virgin Comics with his son Gotham Chopra and entrepreneur Richard Branson. In 2016 Chopra was promoted from assistant professor to full professor at the University of California, San Diego in their Department of Family Medicine.
Chopra believes 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 being undergirded by a "quantum mechanical body" comprised not of matter but of 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.
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