choprawoo

Way, way back in the day, before I took an interest in pseudoscientific medical claims, I knew who Deepak Chopra was. Back then, though, like most doctors, I didn’t pay much attention to him and didn’t know much about him other than that he was some sort of alternative medicine guru, a physician who had embraced Ayurvedic medicine and blathered about “quantum” consciousness. It didn’t take long once I embraced skepticism to run face-first into the utter woo that s Deepak Chopra’s message, in part thanks to other skeptical bloggers introducing me to his woo. Indeed, back in the early days of…
I’m sure that most of you watched the Presidential debate on Monday night, just as I did. Over the years, these debates have always always painful for me to watch, given the candidates’ tendency to answer the question they want to answer rather than the question actually answered; to find ways to spew prepackaged talking points into answers, whether they’re related to the question or not; and, above all, to see how much spin they can get away with. Particularly annoying is when they pander to their base with particularly brain dead bon mots. Candidates from both parties do it, of course, but…
Of all the slick woo peddlers out there, one of the most famous (and most annoying) is Deepak Chopra. Indeed, he first attracted a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence a mere 10 months after this blog started, when Chopra produced the first of many rants against nasty "skeptics" like me that I've deconstructed over the years. Eventually, the nonsensical nature of his pseudo-profound blatherings inspired me to coin a term to describe it: Choprawoo. Unfortunately, far too many people find Deepak Chopra's combination of mystical sounding pseudo-profundity, his invocation of "cosmic consciousness"…