“Thank you, but I’d rather die behind the chemical sheds.” - Evey Hammond, V for Vendetta

By Brian Thompson

I. The Set Up

Maybe this should go without saying, but you should never trust a spiritual leader who…  Wait, that’s the end of the thought.  You should never trust a spiritual leader. No one can pretend to lead you down a path of holiness without having a holier-than-thou complex himself.  Granted, any sort of inflated sense of self Deepak Chopra has cultivated over the years isn’t entirely baseless.  Lots of people have given him lots of money because they think he might be able to fill whatever holes they have in their lives.  It’s a good gig if you can get it, and I won’t fault Chopra for a little reveling.  Others may say he’s profiting off of empty platitudes and false hope, and they’d be right.  But if I could get away with spouting pseudoscientific neo-spiritualist nonsense and be rewarded with some celebrity hobnobbing, I can’t say I wouldn’t jump at the opportunity.

Unfortunately, I live down here in reality, and I have this pesky thing called a conscience that keeps me from lying to people for money.  I just lie to people for fun.  So what is it about Deepak Chopra’s “quantum mechanical body” that allows him to cheerfully cash all those royalty checks and lovingly embrace Oprah’s gullible little apple cheeks?  How can I shrug off these last vestiges of humanity that are keeping me financially shackled?  Can Deepak Chopra show me the way to fabulous, unscrupulous wealth?

II. The Findings

Turns out Deepak Chopra wasn’t always a figurehead on the great, bloated battleship of nonsense.  He actually used to be a real medical doctor.  An endocrinologist, in fact.  He later even worked as chief of staff at New England memorial hospital.  Lest you find yourself impressed by these credentials, you should know that even at that time, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Chopra apparently didn’t possess many critical thinking skills.  Because a “spiritual leader” named Brihaspati Dev Triguna, who practiced a form of Indian spiritualist medicine called Ayurvedic, told Chopra that he would suffer heart disease if he didn’t embrace mystical mumbo jumbo.  Soon after, Chopra totally ditched the whole evidence-based bag and tuned in to Transcendental Meditation, a ridiculous, cult-like racket I’ve previously covered in this column.

The fact that Chopra, a trained medical doctor, would fall for such nonsense on what seems to be nothing more than a baseless assertion speaks to a certain untrustworthiness in his powers of discernment.  Let’s just say I’m glad I was never one of his patients, since I’d much rather my ills be treated with actual medicine than a simple dose of happy thoughts.  And that’s exactly what Chopra has been peddling all these years, to great financial success.  His philosophy, mapped out over the course of several books, columns, and TV appearances, is really nothing more than the power of positive thinking.

No one claims that thinking positively is a bad thing.  It’s probably better for a terminal cancer patient, for example, to try and keep a chin up instead of screaming in emotional agony every passing minute.  But that doesn’t mean that positive thinking has any sort of physiological effect, much less the miraculous healing powers that Chopra claims it does.  Scientific evidence, in fact, has shown the contrary.

I suppose since Chopra has a background in actual science, he feels he needs to couch his baseless assertions in something a little more academic than the vaguely mystical jargon he’s cribbed from Indian culture.  (This, by the way, is just another example of hucksters playing to people’s blind faith in the “spiritual” and “foreign” simply because they don’t understand other cultures and subsequently ascribe “ancient wisdom” to them.  The Chinese have been practicing acupuncture for centuries now, but that doesn’t mean it actually works.)  So, Chopra has chosen to wrap his nonsensical ravings in the terminology of quantum physics.  “Terminology” being the operative word here, since he clearly has no grasp on the actual mechanics at play here.

So, instead of using words like “chi” or “life force”, Chopra calls our hypothetical, non-physical selves the “quantum mechanical body”.  Because quantum physics can seem confusing, contradictory, and unpredictable to those who don’t take the time to understand it (and even many who do), Chopra can easily mold it to fit whatever crazy idea he wants.  Instead of saying the mind can send positive vibes to a person’s broken leg, thereby healing it, Chopra can say that the quantum energy contained in the spaces between our atoms can be redirected across the dimensional planes to effect positive progress on our healing matrices.

No, that doesn’t make any sense.  One of the generic tropes of any new age philosophy is using the word “energy” in place of an actual idea.  Ghosts are made of “energy”, God is an “energy force”, you think Deepak Chopra is an @$$hole because you’re full of “negative energy”.  Calling it “quantum” doesn’t make it any more real.  All of Chopra’s philosophy boils down to baseless assertions that are purposefully made vague and cheerful in order to nestle themselves in the gaps between actual knowledge.

But while Chopra’s quantum healing crap makes up the bulk of his business model, his ridiculous medical opinions occasionally take more concrete forms.  For example, he claims to be able to judge the state of your soul by taking your pulse.  Why?  He doesn’t know.  Someone just told him he could do that.  Also, he claims that allergies are caused by chronic indigestion and that cataracts can be removed by rubbing your eyes with your own spit.

Yes, this man went to medical school.

III. The Conclusion

Of course, the real problem here isn’t that Deepak Chopra exists, but that people continue to give him money in exchange for literally nothing.  Why do so many of us have such a gaping hole in our lives that we need to pay frauds and liars to sell us platitudes?  Yes, I said “fraud”.  In 1991, Chopra co-authored a paper for the Journal of the American Medical Association in which he praised the virtues of Ayurvedic medicine while claiming to be a disinterested party in Ayurveda’s promotion.  But when JAMA investigated, they discovered that Chopra had a deep financial interest in the companies and organizations (owned by the leader of the TM cult) that sell Ayurvedic products and services.  Funny how so many people are making money off of ancient spiritual wisdom.

My problem seems to be the fact that people like Deepak Chopra are actually the ones filling my life full of frustrated holes.  Which, I suppose, is some kind of quantum paradox sort of thing.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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