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Deepak Chopra (born October 22, 1947) is an Indian-American alternative medicine and New Age guru. He is the author of dozens of books and over 100 audio or video products on complementary medicine, making him one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in the holistic health movement.

A licensed physician, Chopra obtained his medical degree in India, and after emigrating to the United States became Chief of Staff at the New England Memorial Hospital (NEMH) in Stoneham, Massachusetts. In the 1980s he began practicing transcendental meditation (TM) and in 1985 resigned his position at NEHM after being invited by the leader of the TM movement, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, to study Ayurveda (Hindu traditional medicine) and to establish the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts. Chopra left the TM movement in 1994 and later founded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, California, with fellow physician David Simon.

Chopra's approach to health focuses on the mind-body relationship and his view that healing is primarily a mental rather than physical process – that "consciousness creates reality." Adopting this holistic approach, he has offered techniques to treat AIDS and cancer, and to extend the human lifespan. This has led to criticism from medical-health professionals, who say his treatments rely on the placebo effect and that he provides patients with false hope that may prevent them from seeking medical assistance.

Early life and education
Chopra was born in New Delhi, India, to Krishan Lal Chopra (1919–2001) and Pushpa Chopra; his mother tongue is Punjabi (his first name, Deepak, means light). His paternal grandfather was a sergeant in the British Army. His father was a prominent cardiologist, head of the department of medicine and cardiology at New Delhi's Mool Chand Khairati Ram Hospital for over 25 years. He was also a lieutenant in the British army, and served as an army doctor at the front at Burma. As of 2014 Chopra's younger brother, Sanjiv, 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 (AIIMS) in 1968. He spent his first months as a doctor working in rural India. It was during his early career that he was drawn to study endocrinology, triggered by his interest in the biological basis for the influence of the emotions.

After immigrating to the United States in 1970 68? he began his clinical internship and residency training at Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield, New Jersey, He had residency terms at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts, and at the University of Virginia Hospital. He earned his license to practice medicine in the state of Massachusetts in 1973, becoming board-certified in internal medicine and specializing in endocrinology. He received his California medical licence in 2004.

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 (later known as the Boston Regional Medical Center) in Stoneham, Massachusetts, before establishing a private practice in Boston in endocrinology.

Visiting New Delhi in 1981, Chopra met the Ayurvedic doctor Brihaspati Dev Triguna, whose advice prompted him to begin investigating Ayurvedic medicine. In 1985 he met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who instructed him to establish an Ayurvedic health center. Chopra left his position at the NEMH and became the founding president of the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine. He was later named medical director of the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center for Stress Management and Behavioral Medicine. In 1989, the Maharishi awarded Chopra the title "Dhanvantari (Lord of Immortality), the keeper of perfect health for the world".

By 1992 Chopra was serving on the National Institute of Health's ad hoc panel on alternative medicine. He said that one of the reasons he left mainstream medicine was his disenchantment at having to prescribe too many drugs. According to Chopra "80 percent of all drugs prescribed today are of optional or marginal benefit".

West Coast years
In 1993 Chopra moved to California and began working for Sharp HealthCare, heading their new Institute for Human Potential and Mind-Body Medicine. He left the Transcendental Meditation movement in January 1994. According to his own account, Chopra was accused by the Maharishi of attempting to compete with the Maharishi's position as guru. According to Robert Todd Carroll, Chopra left the TM organization when it "became too stressful" and was a "hindrance to his success".

Alternative medicine business
In 1996 Sharp HealthCare changed ownership and broke off its relationship with Chopra. With neurologist David Simon, Chopra founded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing at the Omni La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California. The publication of Chopra's Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old (1993) gained him an interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show and coverage in People magazine.

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-aging" can cost up to $10,000, Offit wrote. According to medical anthropologist Hans Baer, Chopra has failed to explore the potential benefits of a truly alternative, holistic approach to health. Instead he offers an alternative form of medical hegemony, focusing on the individual and the "worried well", usually well-off members of the upper and middle-classes.

Education, charity and advisory roles
In 2005 Chopra was appointed as a senior scientist at Gallup. As of 2014 he serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and 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 2009 he founded the Chopra Foundation, a non-profit that raises funds to promote and research holistic medicine. He founded the American Association for Ayurvedic Medicine (AAAM) and Maharishi AyurVeda Products International, and sits on the board of advisors of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association and the tech startup State.com.

Quantum healing
Chopra has been called America's most prominent spokesman for Ayurveda. He has described his approach to healing using the metaphor "quantum healing". This refers both to a discrete jump from one level of functioning to another – a quantum leap – and to the idea of thought as an irreducible building block. Chopra has equated spontaneous remission in cancer to a jump to "a new level of consciousness that prohibits the existence of cancer".

Of the aging process, Chopra has written that it is, to some extent, learned behavior and reversible – accelerated by the accumulation of toxins in the body (including toxic emotions), and slowed down by physical exercise, good nutrition, meditation and love.

Chopra has described the AIDS virus as emitting "a sound that lures the DNA to its destruction". The condition can be treated, according to Chopra, with "Ayurveda's primordial sound". Taking issue with this view, medical professor Lawrence Schneiderman has said that ethical issues are raised when alternative medicine is not based on empirical evidence and that, "to put it mildly, Dr. Chopra proposes a treatment and prevention program for AIDS that has no supporting empirical data".

Ptolemy Tompkins wrote in Time magazine in 2008 that "Chopra has steadily enlarged his reputation from that of healer to philosopher-at-large", and for most of his career has been a "magnet for criticism". According to Tompkins, the medical and scientific communities' opinion of Chopra ranges from dismissive to "outright damning", particularly because Chopra's claims for the effectiveness of alternative medicine could lure sick people away from effective treatments. Tompkins concluded that "Chopra is as rich as he is today not because he has been dishonest with anyone, but because his basic message... is one that he wants to believe in just as sincerely as his readers do." According to Robert Carroll, Chopra "charges $25,000 per lecture performance, where he spouts a few platitudes and gives spiritual advice while warning against the ill effects of materialism".

Distance healing
In 2001 ABC News aired a show segment on distance healing and prayer. In it Chopra said that "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 attempting to relax a person in another room, whose vital signs were recorded in charts said to show a correspondence between Chopra's periods of concentration and the subject's periods of relaxation. After the show, a poll of its viewers found that 90 per cent believed in distance healing.

Health and science journalist Christopher Wanjek criticized the experiment, saying that any correlation evident from the charts would be coincidental, and that more detailed examination of the timing of the charts showed the correlations were not as close as claimed. Wanjek characterized the broadcast as "an instructive example of how bad medicine is presented as exciting news" which had "a dependence on unusual or sensational science results that others in the scientific community renounce as unsound".

Spirituality and religion
Chopra has written that his thought has been inspired by Jiddu Krishnamurti, a 20th-century speaker and writer on philosophical and spiritual subjects. In August 2005 Chopra wrote a series of articles on the creation-evolution controversy and Intelligent design.

In 2012, reviewing War of the Worldviews, written as a debate between Chopra and physicist Leonard Mlodinow about cosmology, evolution, consciousness and God, physics professor Mark Alford wrote that "the counterpoint to Chopra's speculations is not science, with its complicated structure of facts, theories, and hypotheses," but rather Occam's razor.

Position on skepticism
Paul Kurtz, an American skeptic and secular humanist, has written that the popularity of Chopra's views is associated with increasing antiscientific attitudes in society, and that such popularity represents an assault on the objectivity of science itself by seeking new, alternative, forms of validation for ideas. Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society, has said that Chopra is "the very definition of what we mean by pseudoscience".

In 2013 Chopra argued that a "stubborn band of militant skeptics" were editing articles on Wikipedia to prevent what he believes would be a fair representation of the views of such figures as Rupert Sheldrake, a parapsychology researcher. The result, Chopra argued, was that the encyclopedia's readers were denied the opportunity to read of attempts to "expand science beyond its conventional boundaries". Biologist Jerry Coyne responded that it was Chopra himself who was losing out, as his views were "exposed as a lot of scientifically-sounding psychobabble".

More broadly, Chopra has attacked skepticism as a whole, writing in The Huffington Post that "[n]o skeptic, to my knowledge, ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others". Astronomer Phil Plait said this statement trembled "on the very edge of being a blatant and gross lie", listing Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould and Edward Jenner as counterexamples.

Use of scientific terminology
Reviewing Susan Jacoby's book, The Age of American Unreason, Wendy Kaminer sees Chopra's popular reception in America as being symptomatic of many Americans' historical inability (as Jacoby puts it) "to distinguish between real scientists and those who peddled theories in the guise of science". Chopra's "nonsensical references to quantum physics" are placed in a lineage of American religious pseudoscience, extending back through Scientology to Christian Science. Physics professor Robert L. Park has written that physicists wince at Chopra's use of quantum in quantum healing. Physics professor Chad Orzel has written that "to a physicist, Chopra's babble about 'energy fields' and 'congealing quantum soup' presents as utter gibberish", but that Chopra makes enough references to technical terminology to convince non-scientists that he understands physics. English professor George O'Har writes that Chopra is an exemplification of the fact that human beings need "magic" in their lives, and places "the sophistries of Chopra" alongside the emotivism of Oprah Winfrey, the special effects and logic of Star Trek, and the magic of Harry Potter.

Chopra has been criticized for his frequent references to the relationship of quantum mechanics to healing processes, a connection that has drawn skepticism from physicists who say it can be considered as contributing to the general confusion in the popular press regarding quantum measurement, decoherence and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In 1998, Chopra was awarded 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". When interviewed in 2013 by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins for a British documentary, The Enemies of Reason, Chopra said that he used the term quantum as a metaphor and that it had little to do with quantum theory in physics. In March 2010, Chopra and Jean Houston debated Sam Harris and Michael Shermer at the California Institute of Technology on the question "Does God Have a Future?" Shermer and Harris criticized Chopra's use of scientific terminology to expound unrelated spiritual concepts.

Brian Cox says that "for some scientists, the unfortunate distortion and misappropriation of scientific ideas that often accompanies their integration into popular culture is an unacceptable price to pay."

Yoga
In April 2010 Aseem Shukla criticized Chopra for suggesting that yoga did not have origins in Hinduism but is an older Indian spiritual tradition. Chopra later said that yoga was rooted in "consciousness alone" expounded by Vedic rishis long before historic Hinduism ever arose, and accused Shukla of having a "fundamentalist agenda". Shukla responded by saying Chopra was an exponent of the art of "How to Deconstruct, Repackage and Sell Hindu Philosophy Without Calling it Hindu!", and said Chopra's mentioning of fundamentalism was an attempt to divert the debate.

Legal actions
In 1991 the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published an article on Ayurvedic medicine that Chopra had co-authored. JAMA subsequently published an erratum stating that it had received information of undisclosed financial interests from the lead author, Hari M. Sharma. This was followed by a six-page article by JAMA associate editor Andrew A. Skolnick, who characterized the paper as a "thinly disguised advertisement for the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement and its products". An article in the journal Science criticized JAMA for accepting the "shoddy science" of the original article. Skolnick later outlined the chain of events in the Newsletter of the National Association of Science Writers. A 1992 defamation lawsuit which Chopra brought against Skolnick and JAMA was dismissed in 1993.

Chopra was sued for copyright infringement by Robert Sapolsky, for using a chart displaying information on the endocrinology of stress without proper attribution, after the publication of Chopra’s book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind. An out-of-court settlement resulted in Chopra correctly attributing material that was researched by Sapolsky.

Personal life, other areas of interest
Deepak is married with two children and three grandchildren. A friend of Michael Jackson for 20 years, Chopra has criticized the "cult of drug-pushing doctors, with their co-dependent relationships with addicted celebrities", saying that he hoped Jackson's death, attributed to an overdose of a prescription drug, would be a call to action. In 2006 Chopra launched Virgin Comics LLC with his son Gotham Chopra and entrepreneur Richard Branson. The company's purpose is to "spread peace and awareness through comics and trading cards that display traditional Kabalistic characters and stories".

Since 2005, Chopra has been a board member of Men's Wearhouse, Inc., a men's clothing distributor and Fortune 1000 company.

Select bibliography

 * &mdash; (1997). Foreword in Candace Pert, The Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Scribner.
 * &mdash; (1997). Foreword in Candace Pert, The Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Scribner.
 * &mdash; (1997). Foreword in Candace Pert, The Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Scribner.
 * &mdash; (1997). Foreword in Candace Pert, The Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Scribner.
 * &mdash; (1997). Foreword in Candace Pert, The Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Scribner.
 * &mdash; (1997). Foreword in Candace Pert, The Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Scribner.
 * &mdash; (1997). Foreword in Candace Pert, The Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Scribner.
 * &mdash; (1997). Foreword in Candace Pert, The Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Scribner.