Deepak Chopra

From medicine to mind-body health

Deepak Chopra is an American author, New Age guru, and alternative medicine advocate, born on October 22, 1946, in New Delhi, British India, to Punjabi Hindu parents. He came of age in a family closely tied to medicine. His father, Krishan Lal Chopra, was a prominent cardiologist who led the department of medicine and cardiology at New Delhi’s Moolchand Khairati Ram Hospital for more than 25 years, and had served as an army doctor in Burma. Chopra studied at St. Columba’s School in New Delhi and graduated from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1969.

His early medical work helped shape the questions that later defined his public career. Chopra spent his first months as a doctor in rural India, including six months in a village where, he wrote, the lights went out whenever it rained. He became interested in endocrinology, especially neuroendocrinology, because he wanted to find a biological basis for the influence of thoughts and emotions. In 1970, after marrying in India, he emigrated with his wife to the United States. He completed a clinical internship at Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield, New Jersey, and between 1971 and 1977 completed residencies in internal medicine at several institutions, including the Lahey Clinic and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He earned his Massachusetts medical license in 1973 and became board certified in internal medicine, specializing in endocrinology.

Chopra taught at the medical schools of Tufts University, Boston University, and Harvard University, and in 1980 became chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Yet his interests were moving beyond conventional hospital practice. While visiting New Delhi in 1981, he met Ayurvedic physician Brihaspati Dev Triguna, whose advice prompted him to investigate Ayurvedic practices. Around this period, Chopra was drinking black coffee by the hour and smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day. He took up Transcendental Meditation to help him stop, and as of 2006 he was still meditating for two hours every morning and half an hour in the evening.

Fame, claims, and criticism

In 1985, Chopra met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and became involved in the Transcendental Meditation movement. He soon resigned from New England Memorial Hospital to establish the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center. He 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. In 1993, he gained a wide following after appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss his books. He later left the TM movement to become executive director of Sharp HealthCare’s Center for Mind-Body Medicine, and in 1996 cofounded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing.

Chopra became one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine, especially through books and videos that promoted a New Age approach to well-being involving yoga, meditation, nutrition, and other therapies. He has claimed that people can attain “perfect health,” free from disease, pain, aging, and death, and has described the body as undergirded by a “quantum mechanical body” made of energy and information. These ideas have been widely criticized by medical and scientific professionals as pseudoscience. Physicists have objected to his use of the term “quantum” in relation to health, and critics have argued that his treatments generally produce only a placebo response and may give false hope.

Still, Chopra’s words continue to find readers because they speak in plain terms to everyday desires: health, calm, meaning, and a better response to stress. A line such as “The healthiest response to life is joy” reflects the appeal of his message at its simplest. Whether embraced as guidance or questioned as science, his public voice belongs to an era when many people looked outside conventional medicine for ways to connect the mind, the body, and daily life.