Saturday 24 May 2014

Deepak Chopra on 'Age Reversal' Concept & His Career

Deepak Chopra on 'Age Reversal' Concept & His Career



Deepak Chopra on 'Age Reversal' Concept & His Career by WSJ Live


Deepak Chopra on 'Age Reversal' Concept & His Career

 

Deepak Chopra on 'Age Reversal' Concept & His Career

 

Biography

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).[6]
photograph
Chopra as a two-year-old with his parents, Krishan Lal Chopra and Pushpa Chopra, circa 1949
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, serving as an army doctor at the front at Burma and acting as a medical adviser to Lord Mountbatten, viceroy of India.[7] 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.[8]
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.[3] 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.[9] 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.[10]
He married in India in 1970 before emigrating with his wife that year to the United States; the couple have two children and three grandchildren.[11] Chopra undertook a clinical internship at Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield, New Jersey, and completed his residency at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts, and the University of Virginia Hospital.[3] He earned his license to practice medicine in the state of Massachusetts in 1973, becoming board-certified in internal medicine and specializing in endocrinology.[12] He received his California medical licence in 2004.[13]

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.[3]
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was an influence on Chopra in the 1980s.
While visiting New Delhi in 1981, he met the physician Brihaspati Dev Triguna, head of the Indian council for Ayurvedic medicine, whose advice prompted him to begin investigating Ayurvedic medicine.[14] Chopra was smoking heavily at the time and making himself ill: "[M]y days were blurring into nights. I was drinking black coffee by the hour and smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day. I had acquired a taste for whisky in the evening. My schedule kept my stomach upset all the time."[15] He decided to take up transcendental meditation to help him stop; as of 2006 he continued to meditate for two hours every morning and half an hour in the evening.[16]
His involvement with TM led to a meeting, in 1984, with the leader of the TM movement, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who asked him to establish an Ayurvedic health center.[17] He left his position at the NEMH to become the founding president of the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine, one of the founders of Maharishi Ayur-Veda Products International, which sold Ayurvedic remedies, and medical director of the Maharishi Ayur-veda Health Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts. The center charged between $2,850 and $3,950 a week, offering Ayurvedic cleansing rituals such as massage, enemas and oil baths, with an extra charge of $1,000 for lessons in transcendental meditation. Celebrity patients included Elizabeth Taylor.[18]
Chopra said that one of the reasons he left mainstream medicine was his disenchantment at having to prescribe too many drugs: "I think it was just the fact that there is a lot of frustration when all you do is prescribe medication, you start to feel like a legalized drug pusher. That doesn't mean that all prescriptions are useless, but it is true that 80 percent of all drugs prescribed today are of optional or marginal benefit."[19]
In 1989 the Maharishi awarded Chopra the title "Dhanvantari (Lord of Immortality), the keeper of perfect health for the world".[20] That year Chopra's Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine was published, followed in 1990 by Perfect Health: The Complete Mind/Body Guide.[21] By 1992 he was serving on the National Institute of Health's ad hoc panel on alternative medicine.[22]
In May 1991 the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published "Letter from New Delhi," an article by Chopra and two others on Ayurvedic medicine and TM.[23] JAMA subsequently published an erratum stating that the lead author, Hari M. Sharma, had undisclosed financial interests.[24] This was followed in October 1991 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".[25] An article in Science criticized JAMA for accepting the "shoddy science" of the original article.[26] Skolnick later outlined the chain of events in the Newsletter of the National Association of Science Writers.[27] Chopra and two TM groups sued Skolnick and JAMA for defamation, asking for $194 million in damages, but the case was dismissed in March 1993.[28]

West Coast years

Chopra in November 2006, speaking at Yahoo!
In June 1993 Chopra moved to California as executive director of Sharp HealthCare's Institute for Human Potential and Mind/Body Medicine. He led their Center for Mind/Body Medicine, a clinic in an exclusive resort in Del Mar that charged $4,000 a week and included Michael Jackson's family among its clients.[29] 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, with their co-dependent relationships with addicted celebrities."[30]
Chopra left the Transcendental Meditation movement around the time he moved to California.[31] According to his own account, the Maharishi had accused him of competing for the position of guru.[32] Robert Todd Carroll's view is that Chopra left because being associated with the TM organization had became a hindrance to his success.[33] His name was reportedly removed from the TM movement's literature, as were his books from their health centers.[29]
Chopra's Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old was published in 1993 (he was sued for copyright infringement because the book used a chart of Robert Sapolsky's without proper attribution; the issue was settled out of court).[34] The book and his friendship with Michael Jackson gained him an interview that year on The Oprah Winfrey Show and coverage in People magazine.[21] The Oprah interview made him a household name.[35]
In 1996 Sharp HealthCare changed ownership and broke off its relationship with Chopra.[36] With neurologist David Simon, Chopra founded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing at the Omni La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California.[37] Paul Offit wrote in 2013 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.[38]

Education, charity and advisory roles

In 2005 Chopra was appointed as a senior scientist at Gallup.[22] As of 2014 he serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.[39] 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.[40]
In 2009 he founded the Chopra Foundation to promote and research holistic medicine; the Foundation sponsors annual Sages and Scientists conferences.[41] He sits on the board of advisors of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association and the tech startup State.com.[42] Since 2005 he has been a board member of Men's Wearhouse, a men's clothing distributor.[43] In 2006 he launched Virgin Comics LLC with his son, Gotham Chopra, and entrepreneur Richard Branson.[44]

Ideas and reception

Consciousness

Further information: Consciousness and Hard problem of consciousness
The basic quest always is "Who am I?" How do you define "I"? The real "I" was never born and never died. It has no definition in space, no boundaries in time, it's eternal, it is unborn and it does not die.
“
”
— Deepak Chopra[45]
Ptolemy Tompkins wrote in Time magazine in 2008 that Chopra's reputation had developed from that of a healer to a public philosopher.[46] He is a philosophical idealist, arguing for the primacy of consciousness over matter and for purpose and intelligence in nature – that mind, or "dynamically active consciousness," is a fundamental feature of the universe.[47]
It is consciousness, he writes, that creates reality; we are not "physical machines that have somehow learned to think ... [but] thoughts that have learned to create a physical machine."[48] He 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."[49]

Quantum healing

Further information: Ayurveda and Quantum mysticism
In his discussions of healthcare Chopra uses the term "quantum healing," defined as the "ability of one mode of consciousness (the mind) to spontaneously correct the mistakes in another mode of consciousness (the body)."[50] He has equated spontaneous remission in cancer to a jump to this new level of consciousness.[51] Physicists have criticized his use of terms from quantum physics as misleading and inapplicable to healthcare; physicist Robert L. Park argues that if Chopra's ideas are substituted for medical intervention, patients may be denied the prospect of effective treatment.[52]
Chopra acknowledges that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, but writes that, from the point of view of Ayurvedic medicine, disease is a failure of intelligence: "'Hearing' the virus in its vicinity, the DNA mistakes it for a friendly or compatible sound ... This is a believable explanation once one realizes that DNA, which the virus is exploiting, is itself a bundle of vibrations." The Ayurvedic remedy is to use "primordial sound," known as Shruti, to correct the distortion. Medical professor Lawrence Schneiderman writes that, "to put it mildly, Dr. Chopra proposes a treatment and prevention program for AIDS that has no supporting empirical data".[53]
Of the aging process, Chopra has written that it is to some extent reversible – accelerated by the accumulation of toxins in the body (including toxic emotions), and slowed down by physical exercise, good nutrition, meditation and love.[54]
According to Tompkins, the medical and scientific communities' opinion of Chopra ranges from dismissive to "outright damning", particularly because his claims could lure sick people away from effective treatments.[46] Medical anthropologist Hans Baer argues that Chopra has not explored the potential benefits of a truly holistic approach to health, ignoring factors such as air and water pollution, racism and inequality, and failing to encourage people to become part of reform movements. Instead he offers an alternative form of medical hegemony, focusing on the individual, often wealthy, "worried well."[55] Robert Carroll writes of Chopra charging $25,000 per lecture, "giving spiritual advice while warning against the ill effects of materialism".[33]

Distance healing

In August 2001 ABC News aired a show segment on distance healing and prayer, in which Chopra attempted to relax a reporter 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.[56] After the show, a poll of its viewers found that 90 per cent believed in distance healing.[57] Health and science journalist Christopher Wanjek characterized the broadcast as "an instructive example of how bad medicine is presented as exciting news," arguing that more detailed examination of the charts showed the correlations were not as close as claimed.[56]

Position on skepticism

Paul Kurtz, an American skeptic and secular humanist, has written that the popularity of Chopra's views is associated with increasing anti-scientific attitudes in society, and that such popularity represents an assault on the objectivity of science by seeking new, alternative, forms of validation for ideas.[58] Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society, has said that Chopra is "the very definition of what we mean by pseudoscience".[59]
Chopra has attacked skepticism as a whole, writing in The Huffington Post that scientists need a sense of wonder.[60] In 2013 he argued that a "stubborn band of militant skeptics" were editing Wikipedia to prevent what he believes would be a fair representation of the views of such figures as Rupert Sheldrake. 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".[61]

Use of scientific terminology

Reviewing Susan Jacoby's book, The Age of American Unreason, Wendy Kaminer sees Chopra's popular reception in America as 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.[62] English professor George O'Har argued that Chopra exemplifies the need of human beings for "magic" in their lives, and placed "the sophistries of Chopra" alongside the emotivism of Oprah Winfrey, the special effects and logic of Star Trek, and the magic of Harry Potter.[63]
Physicists have criticized Chopra's references to the relationship of quantum mechanics to healing processes, arguing that it contributes to the confusion in the popular press regarding quantum measurement, decoherence and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.[64][52] In 1998 he 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".[65]
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?" Harris criticized Chopra's use of terms from quantum mechanics as "spooky physics," and accused him of merging two language games in a "completely unprincipled way."[66] Interviewed in 2007 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.[67]

Yoga

In April 2010 Aseem Shukla, co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation, criticized Chopra for suggesting that yoga did not have its origins in Hinduism but in an older Indian spiritual tradition. Chopra later said that yoga was rooted in consciousness alone, expounded by Vedic rishis long before Hinduism ever arose. Shukla responded that Chopra was an exponent of the art of "How to Deconstruct, Repackage and Sell Hindu Philosophy Without Calling it Hindu!"[68]

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Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra 2013.jpg
Chopra in his office, August 2013
Born October 22, 1947 (age 66)
New Delhi, India
Nationality American
Occupation New Age and alternative-medicine advocate, physician, public speaker, writer
Spouse(s) Rita Chopra
Children Mallika Chopra and Gotham Chopra
Parents Krishan Chopra, Pushpa Chopra
Website
www.deepakchopra.com
Deepak Chopra (/ˈdiːpɑːk ˈtʃoʊprə/) (born October 22, 1947) is an Indian-American author, public speaker, and licensed physician who is a prominent alternative-medicine advocate and New-Age guru.[1] The author of several dozen books and videos, he has become one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in the holistic-health movement.[2]
Chopra obtained his medical degree in India before emigrating in 1970 to the United States, where he specialized in endocrinology and 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 establish the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts. Chopra left the TM movement in 1994 and, together with neurologist David Simon, founded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, California.[3]
Combining principles from Ayurveda (Hindu traditional medicine) and conventional medicine, Chopra's approach to health incorporates ideas about the mind-body relationship, teleology in nature and the primacy of consciousness over matter – that "consciousness creates reality."[4] He has written that his practices can extend the human lifespan and treat chronic disease, a position criticized by scientists, who say his treatments rely on the placebo effect, that he misuses terms and ideas from quantum physics (quantum mysticism), and that he provides people with false hope that may deny them effective medical treatment.[5]
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