Deepak Chopra (born 1946) is an alternative medicine expert to some, and a money-making guru to others. He has sold over 10 million books in 30 languages, and is a friend and advisor to celebrities. His core belief, as Richard Acello of the San Diego Business Journal noted, is "that the human body and spirit are intimately connected."

Born in New Delhi, India in 1946, Deepak Chopra was the eldest son of Krishan Chopra, a prominent cardiologist who served as the dean of a local hospital and a lieutenant in the British army. Chopra and his younger brother Sanjiv were raised in a privileged Hindu household. They read the classics of British literature and memorized the streets of London.

In high school, Chopra wanted to be a journalist or an actor. It was a character in the Sinclair Lewis story Arrowsmith, that inspired him to become a doctor. In his 1988 autobiography, Return of the Rishi, Chopra described the Lewis novel: "It had what I needed—the hero was a doctor and the doctor was a hero. At moments he was almost a god, bringing healing to skeptical mortals like an angelic doctor."

Chopra attended the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. He also developed an interest in existentialist philosophy. In 1995, he told Chip Brown in an Esquire, magazine interview, "I was motivated by an idealistic fever to find what you would call, for lack of any other expression, the meaning of life. I'm still struggling with that."

Chopra spent his first six months after completing medical school treating rural villagers in India. In 1970, at the age of 23, he came to the United States with his new wife, Rita. Chopra served as an intern for $200 a month at a 400-bed hospital in Plainfield, New Jersey. The hospital needed replacements for staff members who had been sent to Vietnam. His first duty as a doctor in the U.S. was to declare a patient dead. As he shared in Return of the Rishi, he soon learned that being a doctor had "little to do with healing and making people happy."

Three years later, Chopra was board-certified in internal medicine and endocrinology, serving as a teaching and research fellow in endocrinology at a hospital affiliated with Tufts University. He worked in Boston-area hospitals, later spending a year in Everett, Massachusetts. In 1980, Chopra went to New England Memorial Hospital, where he was named chief-of-staff by the age of 35.

Smoking too many cigarettes and drinking too much coffee and alcohol in an effort to relieve the stress of his busy life, Chopra decided that he had to make a change. He turned to his philosophical interests, reading a book on transcendental meditation (TM). The practice of TM helped him quit drinking, quit smoking, and unwind.

Two Life-Changing Meetings

In 1981, while on a trip to New Delhi, a friend took him to see a master Ayurvedic physician, Brihaspati Dev Triguna. Ayurveda is a Sanskrit word meaning "science of life," and focuses on balancing the flow of energy in the body. Triguna advised him to spend more time with his family and to take more time to sit quietly, among other things. The ancient wisdom of the Indian sages, or rishis, provided the basis for Chopra's new path. His visit to Triguna and its benefits to his own life, sparked his interest in pursuing an Ayurvedic approach to medicine.

In 1985, Chopra met the founder of the TM movement, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in Washington, D.C. The Maharishi, once a regular guest on the Tonight Show and spiritual advisor to the Beatles, had been promoting Ayurvedic medicine and marketing products for it. Chopra and his wife were invited by a colleague at Harvard to attend a lecture given by the Maharishi.

After listening for several hours, the Chopras discreetly got up and walked into the lobby. Moments later, the Maharishi approached them, handing each a flower. He asked them to come up to his room. The two hesitated, knowing they would miss the last flight to Boston that night, but went anyway. They talked for two hours. "Maharishi did not lay out the details of Ayurveda for us that night, but he made the theme vividly clear. Health and disease are connected like variations on one melody. But disease is a wrong variation, a distortion of the theme," Chopra recalled in Return of the Rishi.

Left Traditional Medicine

Chopra left his endocrinology practice to become the Maharishi's corporate officer and run an Ayurvedic clinic in Lancaster, Massachussets. In explaining why he left traditional medicine, Chopra told Acello, "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."