70 Facts About Deepak Chopra

Deepak 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.

Shortly thereafter, Deepak Chopra resigned from his position at NEMH to establish the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center.

In 1993, Deepak Chopra gained a following after he was interviewed about his books on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Deepak Chopra then left the TM movement to become the executive director of Sharp HealthCare's Center for Mind-Body Medicine.

The ideas Deepak Chopra promotes have regularly been criticized by medical and scientific professionals as pseudoscience.

Philosopher Robert Carroll writes that Deepak Chopra, to justify his teachings, attempts to integrate Ayurveda with quantum mechanics.

Deepak 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.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has said that Deepak Chopra uses "quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus".

Deepak Chopra's paternal grandfather was a sergeant in the British Indian Army.

Deepak Chopra's 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 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.

Deepak Chopra completed his primary education at St Columba's School in New Delhi and graduated from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi in 1969.

Deepak Chopra 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 married in India in 1970 before emigrating, with his wife, to the United States that same year.

Consequently, Deepak Chopra had to travel to Sri Lanka to take it.

Deepak Chopra earned his license to practice medicine in the state of Massachusetts in 1973, becoming board certified in internal medicine, specializing in endocrinology.

Deepak 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 in Stoneham, Massachusetts before establishing a private practice in Boston in endocrinology.

Deepak Chopra was "drinking black coffee by the hour and smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day".

Deepak Chopra took up Transcendental Meditation to help him stop, and as of 2006, he continued to meditate for two hours every morning and half an hour in the evening.

Deepak Chopra 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.

When Jackson died in 2009 after being administered prescription drugs, Deepak 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".

Deepak Chopra left the Transcendental Meditation movement around the time he moved to California in January 1993.

Mahesh Yogi claimed that Deepak Chopra had competed for the Maharishi's position as guru, although Deepak Chopra rejected this.

Deepak Chopra stated that he had become uncomfortable with what seemed like a "cultish atmosphere around Maharishi".

In 1995, Deepak Chopra was not licensed to practice medicine in California where he had a clinic.

Deepak Chopra is the owner and supervisor of the Mind-Body Medical Group within the Deepak 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 is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists.

Paul Offit writes that within 24 hours Deepak Chopra had sold 137,000 copies of his book and 400,000 by the end of the week.

Medical anthropologist Hans Baer said Deepak 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.

Deepak Chopra serves as an adjunct professor in the marketing division at Columbia Business School.

Deepak Chopra serves as adjunct professor of executive programs at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Deepak Chopra 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, Deepak 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.

Robert Carroll writes of Deepak Chopra charging $25,000 per lecture, "giving spiritual advice while warning against the ill effects of materialism".

Deepak Chopra founded the American Association for Ayurvedic Medicine and Maharishi AyurVeda Products International, though he later distanced himself from these organizations.

In 2005, Deepak Chopra was appointed as a senior scientist at The Gallup Organization.

Deepak Chopra sits on the board of advisors of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association, an organization based in the United States.

In 2012, Deepak Chopra joined the board of advisors for tech startup State.

In 2015, Deepak Chopra partnered with businessman Paul Tudor Jones II to found JUST Capital, a non-profit firm which ranks companies in terms of just business practices in an effort to promote economic justice.

Deepak Chopra is a member of the inaugural class of the Great Immigrants Award named by Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Deepak Chopra speaks and writes regularly about metaphysics, including the study of consciousness and Vedanta philosophy.

Deepak Chopra argues that the evolution of species is the evolution of consciousness seeking to express itself as multiple observers; the universe experiences itself through our brains: "We are the eyes of the universe looking at itself".

Deepak Chopra argues that everything that happens in the mind and brain is physically represented elsewhere in the body, with mental states directly influencing physiology through neurotransmitters such as dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin.

In discussing health care, Deepak Chopra has used the term "quantum healing", which he defined in Quantum Healing as the "ability of one mode of consciousness to spontaneously correct the mistakes in another mode of consciousness ".

Deepak Chopra coined the term quantum healing to invoke the idea of a process whereby a person's health "imbalance" is corrected by quantum mechanical means.

Deepak Chopra said that quantum phenomena are responsible for health and well-being.

Deepak Chopra has attempted to integrate Ayurveda, a traditional Indian system of medicine, with quantum mechanics to justify his teachings.

Deepak Chopra has equated spontaneous remission in cancer to a change in a quantum state, corresponding to a jump to "a new level of consciousness that prohibits the existence of cancer".

Deepak Chopra wrote in 2000 that his AIDS patients were combining mainstream medicine with activities based on Ayurveda, including taking herbs, meditation, and yoga.

Deepak Chopra acknowledges that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus but says that "'hearing' the virus in its vicinity, the DNA mistakes it for a friendly or compatible sound".

Deepak Chopra has been described as "America's most prominent spokesman for Ayurveda".

Deepak Chopra has metaphorically described the AIDS virus as emitting "a sound that lures the DNA to its destruction".

In 2013, The New York Times stated that Deepak Chopra is "the controversial New Age guru and booster of alternative medicine".

Deepak Chopra has become one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in the holistic-health movement.

Tompkins considered Deepak Chopra a "beloved" individual whose basic messages centered on "love, health and happiness" had made him rich because of their popular appeal.

Deepak Chopra believes that "ageing is simply learned behaviour" that can be slowed or prevented.

Deepak Chopra has said that he expects "to live way beyond 100".

Deepak Chopra has written that human beings' brains are "hardwired to know God" and that the functions of the human nervous system mirror divine experience.

Deepak Chopra has written that his thinking has been inspired by Jiddu Krishnamurti, a 20th-century speaker and writer on philosophical and spiritual subjects.

Alford considers the two sides of the debate a false opposition and says that "the counterpoint to Deepak Chopra's speculations is not science, with its complicated structure of facts, theories, and hypotheses", but rather Occam's razor.

In 2010, Shermer said that Deepak Chopra is "the very definition of what we mean by pseudoscience".

Paul Kurtz, an American skeptic and secular humanist, has written that the popularity of Deepak Chopra's views is associated with increasing anti-scientific attitudes in society, and such popularity represents an assault on the objectivity of science itself by seeking new, alternative forms of validation for ideas.

In 2013, Deepak Chopra published an article on what he saw as "skepticism" at work in Wikipedia, arguing that a "stubborn band of militant skeptics" were editing articles to prevent what he believes would be a fair representation of the views of such figures as Rupert Sheldrake, an author, lecturer, and researcher in parapsychology.

The result, Deepak Chopra argued, was that the encyclopedia's readers were denied the opportunity to read of attempts to "expand science beyond its conventional boundaries".

The biologist Jerry Coyne responded, saying that it was instead Deepak Chopra who was losing out as his views were being "exposed as a lot of scientifically-sounding psychobabble".

English professor George O'Har writes that Deepak Chopra is an exemplification of the fact that human beings need "magic" in their lives, and places "the sophistries of Deepak Chopra" alongside the emotivism of Oprah Winfrey, the special effects and logic of Star Trek, and the magic of Harry Potter.

Deepak 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, Deepak 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 by ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the Channel 4 documentary The Enemies of Reason, Deepak Chopra said that he used the term "quantum physics" as "a metaphor" and that it had little to do with quantum theory in physics.

Deepak Chopra later said that yoga was rooted in "consciousness alone" expounded by Vedic rishis long before historic Hinduism ever arose.

An out-of-court settlement resulted in Deepak Chopra correctly attributing material that was researched by Sapolsky.