Deepak Chopra

Deepak Chopra is an Indian-American expert in mind-body healing, and a world-renowned speaker and author on alternative medicine. After studying medicine in India, he ended up in Boston and began his career as a doctor. On meeting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi he became involved with the Transcendental Meditation movement, and resigned from his position at NEMH to establish the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center. After a few years, he left Transcendental Meditation movement to become the executive director of Sharp HealthCare's Center for Mind-Body Medicine, and co-founded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing. Chopra believes that the human body is composed of energy, and thus human aging is fluid and changeable, depending on the determination of one's state of mind. However, medical and scientific professionals have criticized his ideas as pseudoscience. Chopra claims that his "quantum healing" cures any ailments, including cancer. The medical community also fears that his claims for the effectiveness of alternative medicine can lure sick people away from medical treatments. Chopra serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, and is an adjunct professor of executive programs at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. A philosophical idealist, he speaks and writes regularly about metaphysics, and about consciousness and Vedanta philosophy. Time magazine has called him "the poet-prophet of alternative medicine", and listed him as one of the top 100 heroes of the century.