Deepak Chopra is an Indian-American medical doctor, author, holistic health and New Age guru, and alternative medicine practitioner.
Doctor Chopra began his medical career after he graduated from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1968. He spent his first months as a doctor working in rural India. He subsequently immigrated to the US in 1970, and began his clinical internship and residency training at Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield, New Jersey. He later became Chief of Staff at the New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts.
In 1985, Chopra met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who instructed him to establish an Ayurvedic health center. He left his position at the New England Memorial Hospital and became the founding president of the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine, and was later named medical director of the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center for Stress Management and Behavioral Medicine. In 1989, the Maharishi awarded him the title “Dhanvantari (Lord of Immortality), the keeper of perfect health for the world.” In 1993, Chopra moved to California began working for Sharp HealthCare, heading their new Institute for Human Potential and Mind-Body Medicine. Chopra, with neurologist David Simon, founded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing at the Omni La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California in 1996. The new center promoted itself as having a “holistic view of life that sees human beings as networks of energy and information, integrating body, mind and spirit.”
Chopra is the author of more than 65 books, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, and an adjunct professor of Executive Programs at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He is also a Distinguished Executive Scholar at Columbia Business School, Columbia University, and a Senior Scientist at the Gallup organization. For more than a decade, he has participated as a lecturer at the Update in Internal Medicine, an annual event sponsored by Harvard Medical School’s Department of Continuing Education and the Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.