#40: A Reflection on Deepak Chopra’s Quantum Healing and the Forgotten Science of Tibb

Where Healing Lost Its Roots: A Study of Language, Loss, and the Science That Remains

Jun 22, 2025

In recent times, the search for healing has expanded beyond medicine, beyond biology, even beyond material explanation. A growing body of literature now urges readers to believe that illness is not just chemical, but energetic and that the body is a projection of consciousness, and that thought itself can rearrange matter. These ideas, once confined to esoteric circles, have become mainstream through the works of public figures like Deepak Chopra, Joe Dispenza, and others who frame the mind as the central architect of health.

Of these, Deepak Chopra’s Quantum Healing (1989) is among the more influential. It introduced a generation of seekers to the idea that health is shaped not by organs or humors, but by intention, awareness, and presence. Chopra’s thesis is that beneath the physical body lies an invisible “quantum body,” composed not of tissues but of energy, information, and intelligence. When this field is disturbed, illness arises; when it is realigned through meditation, belief, and inner stillness, the body heals and sometimes spontaneously.

Such ideas speak to a real hunger: for agency in one’s health, for meaning in suffering, and for a system of care that includes both soul and body. But they also raise urgent questions about the precision of language, the source of such ideas, and the structure required for healing to be real, not merely symbolic.

This essay does not attempt a comprehensive critique of all mind-based healing models. Though figures like Joe Dispenza offer similar concepts, that thoughts can influence biology, and that belief alone can activate genetic expression, our focus here remains on Chopra’s Quantum Healing, because of its global influence, its philosophical claims, and its attempt to borrow scientific and spiritual authority simultaneously.

The analysis proceeds in four parts:

First, by presenting Chopra’s key claims in his own language.
Second, by introducing the foundational framework of Tibb; a structured and spiritually coherent medical system developed over centuries and codified by scholars such as Ibn Sīnā.
Third, by showing where Chopra’s theory detaches from that structure; retaining fragments of wisdom, but stripping away diagnosis, causality, and the material soul-body interplay that defined Tibb.
Finally, by tracing how this dislocation enabled a model of healing based on metaphor and market, rather than method and hikmah.

To see what was taken apart, we first need to understand how it was originally built.

Chapter I: The Claim of Quantum Healing

A Close Reading of the Text

Deepak Chopra’s Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine was first published in 1989 and later reissued in expanded form. Written in a hybrid tone of gentle mysticism and speculative science, the book attempts to reframe human healing as a process rooted in consciousness, rather than material intervention. The text weaves anecdote, metaphor, and occasional scientific name-dropping into a single claim: that at the deepest level, the body is shaped and even governed by the mind and that this connection operates at what Chopra repeatedly calls the “quantum level.”

Let us first examine what he means by this, in his own words.

1.1 The Core Thesis: The Quantum Body

“Quantum healing is healing the bodymind from a quantum level. That means from a level which is not manifest at a sensory level. Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence and energy.”
— p. 5

Chopra begins by rejecting the classical biomedical model: what he calls the “Newtonian” body, composed of tissues, chemistry, and signaling pathways. In its place, he proposes a second, deeper reality: a “quantum body,” which he describes as subtle, non-physical, and non-local.

“The quantum body is the energy and information that is enfolded in deeper space-time.” — p. 9
“The quantum body is composed not of matter but of energy and information... a pattern of probability waves.” — p. 11

Here, Chopra lifts terms directly from quantum physics, “probability waves,” “space-time,” “non-local”, but without anchoring them in any scientific theory, literature, or defined system of application. The concepts remain unmapped and undefined, used not with mathematical or physical precision, but as poetic substitutes for mystery.

What makes this particularly problematic is not merely the scientific vagueness, but the absence of attribution to traditions that already described the subtle body in great depth. The idea that human beings possess an inner, non-material layer of intelligence is not novel. It is, in fact, foundational across nearly every major medical and spiritual tradition.

In Tibb, this is the rūḥ, understood not as metaphor but as an organizing, vivifying force. In Islamic metaphysics, the rūḥ is described as amr, a direct command from the Divine (Qur’an 17:85), invisible to perception, yet central to life and healing.

In Chinese medicine, this role is played by qi, an animating force that flows through meridians. In Ayurveda, it is prāṇa, the breath-force that sustains body and mind. Even in Greek philosophy, the psyche and pneuma were recognized as layers of subtle animation beyond the visible body.

Had Chopra chosen to ground his “quantum body” in any of these rich, inherited traditions, he might have preserved coherence. But by discarding both empirical biology and metaphysical ancestry, he replaces structure with abstraction.

His “quantum body” is not built on the foundations of hikmah, nor on the scaffolding of science. It is untethered, described in evocative terms, but without diagnosis, causality, lineage, or application.

1.2 Mind as the Causal Agent of Health

Chopra frames illness as a psychological and spiritual misalignment, not a pathological breakdown of tissues or systems. Health is the natural state of the “self-aware” body; disease is a sign of disconnection.

“The quantum body exists outside time and space. It is part of the invisible field that lies beneath everything in nature... When we access this field, spontaneous healing becomes possible.”
— p. 26
“Perfect health is a state of dynamic balance in which all systems are coordinated through inner intelligence. That intelligence is mind, and it pervades every cell.”
— p. 31

The implication is clear: if you can restore inner awareness, the body will correct itself. But how is this done?

1.3 The Method: Meditation, Belief, Visualization

“The key to quantum healing is intention... If you can place your attention on the body and then infuse it with intention, change will begin at the cellular level.”
— p. 74
“In meditation, the mind quiets down enough to make contact with the quantum field... where transformation originates.”
— p. 62
“Our cells are eavesdropping on our thoughts. What you think has biochemical consequences.”
— p. 109

This is repeated often: intention drives biology. Thought is molecular. Awareness is causal. But the causal mechanism is never defined, there are no molecular pathways, no receptors, no epigenetic models, no neuroimmunology. The language of biochemistry is used, but only metaphorically.

1.4 Invoking Science Without Anchoring It

“We know from quantum physics that the act of observation collapses a wave function... This is how your attention creates your reality.”
— p. 44
“Just as an electron exists in a state of potential until observed, your body exists in a field of potential until shaped by awareness.”
— p. 45

This is one of the most persistent motifs in Chopra’s work: borrowing the language of quantum mechanics, specifically wave function collapse, observer effect, and non-locality, and applying it wholesale to the mind-body system.

No physicist would accept this transfer. The quantum observer effect refers to measurement in isolated systems at the subatomic scale, not to thought influencing liver cells or tumor regression. Chopra uses quantum theory as a poetic device, not a model.

1.5 Disease as Disruption in Awareness

“Cancer is not a thing; it is a process... a mistake in cellular memory.”
— p. 81
“If the quantum body is restored, cancer may dissolve without physical intervention.”
— p. 83

This is a bold claim. Chopra suggests that diseases, including cancer, are the result of errors in “quantum-level communication,” and that healing can occur by re-aligning the consciousness of the patient.

Nowhere in the book are there case studies with biochemical data, or citations of medical literature. The anecdotes are compelling, patients who meditated, prayed, let go of fear, and healed, but they are not studied, reproduced, or contextualized within pathology.

1.6 The Narrative Arc: From Despair to Transcendence

Quantum Healing is not just a theory, it is a story. It is structured like a spiritual journey: the reader begins in confusion and sickness, becomes aware of deeper forces, and gradually awakens to inner power.

“You are not in your body, your body is in you. Your self is the field in which all bodily processes unfold.”
— p. 114
“You are not a victim of molecules. You are the chooser of possibility.”
— p. 118

The book ends in a metaphysical crescendo. Healing becomes awakening. Disease becomes illusion. The self becomes unbounded consciousness. It is inspiring, but without mechanism, without definition, and without lineage.

Chapter II: The Structure of Tibb

Medicine as Coherence, Not Concept

To understand what was borrowed and rebranded in Quantum Healing, we must return to the body of knowledge it quietly reflects but never names: Tibb. Also known as Unani medicine, this Greco-Arabic system was refined over centuries. It was codified by scholars such as Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, al-Rāzī, al-Majūsī, Ibn Rushd, and most prominently Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), whose Qānūn fil-Tibb served as the backbone of medical education from the Islamic East to medieval Europe.

Where Chopra speaks of energy and balance, Tibb names temperament and humoral interaction. Where Chopra refers to "information" and "intelligence," Tibb speaks of quwwat mudabbira, the governing or directing faculty within the body. Where Chopra proposes healing through intention or stillness, Tibb presents an entire diagnostic and therapeutic system that accounts for both visible physiology and invisible forces like the rūḥ and the nafs.

This chapter lays out the foundations of Tibb as a complete and functional science. Its claims are not metaphors. They are procedural. They are not inspirational slogans. They are traceable through text, lineage, and clinical practice.

2.1 Cosmological Foundations

Tibb begins with a principle that human beings are not separate from nature. The same substances and qualities that form the universe also form the body. This unity is not romantic or symbolic. It is the framework for diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.

The four elements:

Fire
Air
Water
Earth

The four qualities:

Hot
Cold
Wet
Dry

The four humors (akhlāt):

Dam (blood), which is hot and moist
Ṣafrā’ (yellow bile), which is hot and dry
Balgham (phlegm), which is cold and moist
Sawdā’ (black bile), which is cold and dry

Health is defined as iʿtidāl, a state of moderated and well-proportioned temperament across these interacting qualities. Illness is a departure (khurūj) from this state. The goal of treatment is to restore this balance, not to attack isolated symptoms.

Ibn Sīnā writes:

"Every organ has a specific temperament fitted to its function. Health consists in preserving this temperament. Disease arises when this balance is lost through internal or external disruption."
(Qānūn fil-Tibb, Book I)

This framework allows the physician to read patterns across body and climate, food and emotion, time and constitution. It treats the person, not the part.

2.2 The Six Essential Causes (Asbāb Sitta Zarūriyya)

Tibb teaches that six categories determine the state of health. These are known as the essential causes. Each one is observable, adjustable, and plays a direct role in physiology.

Air and Climate (al-Hawāʾ)
Includes seasonal shifts, ambient temperature, humidity, wind, and pollution. These affect humoral states and organ rhythms.
Food and Drink (al-Maʾkūl wa al-Mashrūb)
Every food has a temperament. It can heat or cool, moisten or dry, nourish or disturb. The physician adjusts diet not by calories but by qualities.
Movement and Rest (al-Ḥarakat wa al-Sukūn al-Badaniyya)
Physical exertion increases internal heat and transforms humors. Stillness allows for recovery. Both must be balanced.
Sleep and Wakefulness (al-Nawm wa al-Yaqaẓa)
Sleep replenishes the rūḥ and balances internal moisture. Poor timing or duration disrupts digestion and weakens the faculties.
Evacuation and Retention (al-Istifrāgh wa al-Iḥtibās)
The body must release what is excess and retain what is needed. Blockage or excessive purging both produce illness.
Emotional and Mental States (al-Ḥarakat wa al-Sukūn al-Nafsāniyya)
Joy, grief, fear, and anger all affect internal heat and the motion of humors. These states are not abstract. They produce direct effects on digestion, circulation, and cognition.

A skilled physician examines the patient’s interaction with these six causes and adjusts them through specific interventions. The result is a form of preventive medicine that is also curative. The aim is always to support the body’s own rhythm of correction.

2.3 Temperament (Mizāj): The Diagnostic Center

Each person has a unique temperament. This is not a label. It is a working description of how their body generates, distributes, and reacts to internal forces.

Temperament influences:

How a person digests
What diseases they are prone to
What climates suit them
What food supports them
How they respond to grief or anger

Examples:

A hot-dry temperament may result in sharp intellect and fast digestion but can lead to insomnia, joint dryness, and irritability.
A cold-moist temperament may bring emotional steadiness and endurance but predispose a person to phlegmatic build-up and sluggish metabolism.

Without reading mizāj, the physician cannot know how to balance the system. Treatment is never generic. It is matched to the patient’s constitution.

2.4 The Soul and Body Are Both Real and Linked

Where Chopra dissolves the body into a field of consciousness, Tibb preserves the body while recognizing the rūḥ (spirit) and nafs (soul) as active forces. These affect digestion, circulation, hormonal balance, and mental clarity.

Tibb does not treat emotions as side effects. It treats them as causal.

Ibn Sīnā writes:

"Fear cools the heart and stomach. Anger brings heat to the liver and sharpens the pulse. Grief dries the blood and diminishes appetite."

The result is not poetic commentary. It is medical protocol. The physician inquires:

When did the grief begin?
What organ became affected?
What was the patient's complexion and pulse before and after?
What changes occurred in sleep, appetite, and stool?

Treatment may involve changes to food, sleep, or social exposure. It may involve prescribed solitude, scent therapy, massage, or counsel. The body and the nafs are treated together.

2.5 Layers of Treatment (Ilāj)

Tibb offers a six-level system of intervention. Each level is escalated only if the prior one is insufficient.

Ilāj bil Ghidhāʾ (Dietary therapy)
The first tool. Food is medicine. Food qualities are chosen to oppose the imbalance.
Ilāj bil Tadbīr (Lifestyle therapy)
Adjusting sleep, air, movement, moisture, and routine.
Ilāj bil Nafs (Psychospiritual regulation)
Treating the nafs through understanding, stillness, or elevation.
Ilāj bil Duwāʾ (Medicinal compounds)
Precise combinations of herbs and substances to restore equilibrium.
Ilāj bil Yad (Manual treatment)
Cupping, massage, aromatherapy, bloodletting, bone-setting.
Ilāj bil Jirāḥa (Surgical treatment)
Used only when others fail, and never rushed.

This progression ensures that healing begins with the least invasive method, and always considers the root causes rather than masking symptoms.

Tibb never claimed that awareness had no role. It taught that awareness is nested in a body with specific organs, fluids, and rhythms. It never claimed that belief alone could cure disease. It prescribed belief when the heart was dry, and broth when the stomach was cold. This is not a system of affirmation. It is a system of coherence. It gives language, structure, and intervention to what Chopra describes only as possibility.

2.6 Ḥarakat wa Sukūn Badani wa Nafsānī

Movement and Stillness, Bodily and Psychological

In Tibb, motion and rest are not lifestyle choices. They are part of the body’s essential relationship to time, temperature, humoral balance, and survival. Every function — circulation, digestion, respiration, thought — is either a movement or a pause. The same applies to the psyche. Joy, grief, anger, and fear are not merely emotional textures. They are real movements within the inner self, each with its own thermal and physiological effects.

When these motions become excessive, deficient, untimely, or misaligned with the body’s state, disease follows. The physician must observe, identify, and treat these shifts not with abstraction, but with action.

2.6.1 The Body (Ḥarakat wa Sukūn al-Badaniyya)

Bodily movement affects internal heat, humoral transformation, muscular tone, and digestive fire. Rest allows tissues to repair and humors to settle.

Types of movement include:

Voluntary (walking, exercise, labor)
Involuntary (pulse, breath, peristalsis)
Excessive (overwork, hyperactivity)
Insufficient (lethargy, stagnation)

Observations from Ibn Sīnā:

"Excessive movement increases internal heat and burns the moist humors... If left unchecked, it leads to dryness, exhaustion, and organ atrophy."
— Qānūn, Book II
"Inactivity weakens the digestive fire, thickens the blood, and leads to accumulation of phlegm and waste."
— Qānūn, Book II

The physician balances movement with rest according to the patient’s temperament, age, season, and presenting condition. For example:

A young man of hot temperament with insomnia and agitation might be prescribed cooling food, early sleep, and no exercise after sunset.
An older woman of cold-moist temperament with fatigue and stiffness may be advised to increase slow, warming movement in the morning and use friction rubs or steam therapy.

2.6.2 The Psyche (Ḥarakat wa Sukūn al-Nafsāniyya)

Tibb views the nafs not as a poetic concept, but as an active, influencing reality within the human being. Its states of motion — joy, sadness, fear, anger, longing, jealousy, contentment — all influence specific organs and humors.

This is what Chopra refers to vaguely when he speaks of "inner intelligence" or the power of belief. In Tibb, these states are defined, their effects are mapped, and their treatments are prescribed.

Classical teachings:

Anger (al-ghaḍab): Heats the blood and liver, sharpens the pulse, dries the mouth. Prolonged anger causes yellow bile excess, liver congestion, and hypertension.
Fear (al-khawf): Cools the heart and stomach, weakens digestive fire, causes loose stools, and leads to accumulation of phlegm.
Grief (al-ḥuzn): Dries the blood, reduces appetite, shrinks the spirit. Often leads to black bile dominance and wasting.
Joy (al-farḥ): Expands the heart, brings warmth to the skin, sharpens digestion, and energizes the faculties — but can overstimulate in excess.

"Every state of the nafs affects the balance of humors and organs. What enters through the thoughts descends to the liver, heart, and brain. The wise physician must treat the cause within before treating the consequence without."
— Ibn al-Nafīs, Sharḥ Tashrīḥ al-Qānūn

2.6.3 Treatment through Adjustment, not Suppression

In Tibb, emotional states are not suppressed. They are understood. The physician examines the trigger, the organ affected, and the way it has altered the patient’s complexion, appetite, pulse, sleep, and dreams.

Interventions may include:

Food: warm, moistening, calming or energizing
Smells: amber, rose, vinegar, musk
Companionship or solitude
Music or silence
Change of location or air
Prescribed reflection, dhikr, or quietude
Manual therapies to regulate heat and moisture

Grief is not treated with positivity. It is treated with warmth and nourishment. Fear is not calmed by insight. It is calmed by restoring internal heat to the heart and stomach.

2.6.4 Modern Echoes without Depth

What Chopra frames as "disconnection from the self," Tibb names as excess movement of the nafs. What he calls “stilling the mind,” Tibb describes as restoring sukūn in the nervous and digestive systems through coordinated adjustments.

But in Quantum Healing, these inner states are treated without grounding. There is no mapping of which emotion impacts which organ, no diagnostic signs to distinguish yellow bile from black, no steps to move from symptom to restoration.

Chopra’s language floats. Tibb’s model walks, breathes, and eats.

Chapter III: From Maristan to Market

The Transformation of Healing into Performance

3.1 The Frame Breaks: What Was Lost

Chopra does not invent the idea that attention alters the body. Nor is he the first to suggest that emotional states can trigger or resolve illness. These claims have deep, ancient roots. They belong to traditions that mapped the body and soul with care, over centuries, with verifiable patterns and protocols.

Tibb is one such system. It sees no contradiction between spirit and substance, no barrier between thought and organ. It explains how grief dries, how rage heats, how joy moistens. It tracks the movement of emotion into humoral change, and from humors into tissue, pulse, and pain. Each shift is treated as a consequence of physical and energetic causes, guided by rules that are both ethical and medical.

Chopra gestures toward the same depth, but replaces its grammar with metaphor. His “quantum body” does not speak of constitutions, or seasons, or causal heat. It speaks instead in tones of awe: energy, field, vibration. These terms are evocative, but undefined. They do not locate change in the liver or spleen. They do not explain when a condition cools or intensifies. They replace direction with impression.

This is not necessarily wrong. But it is profoundly dislocated.

Chopra retains the suggestion that the body is more than matter, but removes the framework that makes this “more” actionable. He retains the claim that awareness heals, but detaches it from all the distinctions that made awareness measurable, tailored, and safe. He invites the reader inward, but offers no map to read what they find there.

Traditions like Tibb did not treat presence as a general medicine. Presence was a state to be applied with precision, suited to mizāj, matched to temperament, guided by pulse, breath, and symptom. It was not an attitude. It was a structured response. The rūḥ had a seat in the heart. The nafs had inclinations that could be studied. Stillness was not a spiritual pose. It was a remedy, adjusted according to moisture, temperature, and time.

By contrast, Chopra speaks to a universal patient. He treats all internal dissonance as equal. He offers attention as a universal salve. There is no diagnosis. No trajectory. No seasonal shifts. There is only the present moment, and the idea that this moment is the doorway to healing.

But attention alone is not enough. Intention, without method, dissolves into self-performance.

This is the moment where healing, once grounded in tradition, becomes vulnerable to commerce. Without mizāj, there is no boundary. Without causality, there is no accountability. And without a frame, there is no protection against reinvention.

3.2 The Rise of the Quantum Market

By the 1990s, Chopra had moved far beyond clinical medicine. He had become a cultural figure, a bridge between Western restlessness and Eastern symbolism. Quantum Healing was followed by The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, then Creating Affluence, and a stream of guided programs. His books sold millions. His retreats filled. His name became shorthand for spiritual authority wrapped in scientific vocabulary.

This was not coincidence. Chopra understood the appeal of language that felt deep but demanded little. The word “quantum” offered precisely that appeal. It was mysterious enough to sound sacred, yet technical enough to feel legitimate. It provided a kind of secular mysticism, stripped of lineage but draped in prestige.

Around the same time, another movement was building: Hemi-Sync, the audio technology developed by Robert Monroe. It used binaural beats to guide brainwaves into altered states. The Monroe Institute taught that by using sound alone, one could enter healing states, explore consciousness, even leave the body. These experiences were presented as universal. No doctrine, no cosmology, no temperament.

Although Chopra never directly acknowledged Hemi-Sync, the structure of his later offerings echoed its approach. He released audio meditations with embedded tones. He guided listeners through staged mental states. He used phrases like “field of potentiality,” “coherence,” and “non-local awareness.” His vocabulary was softer than Monroe’s, filled with Sanskrit terms and poetic images. But the method was nearly identical.

Both systems replaced the maristan with the market. Both sold healing as experience. And both positioned the self as the healer, with no system behind it.

In Tibb, healing was never left to interpretation. The maristan was a place of laws, not impressions. Physicians were salaried so that care could not be bought. Diagnosis followed structure, rooted in observation and adjusted for age, place, and climate. There was no improvisation by belief alone.

Chopra's version flips this entirely. The inner world is not charted by diagnosis but accessed through desire. The healer is not a muḥaqqiq, a discerner of causes, but a facilitator of affirmation. And the method is no longer medicine. It is affirmation, guided by sound, framed by suggestion, priced per download.

3.3 Healing as Performance

When healing is stripped of structure, it turns into theater. The patient becomes a performer. If their condition does not improve, the failure is placed on the depth of their intention. This is a sharp departure from traditional systems, where illness was treated as a misalignment, not as a sign of spiritual lack.

In Chopra’s model, healing becomes a test of one's ability to hold presence. But this presence is undefined, and so the burden shifts inward. You are told that your body is pure potential. If you are still unwell, perhaps you have not tapped it deeply enough.

In classical systems, including Tibb, the doctor was a steward of balance. He did not manipulate belief. He observed signs, read the pulse, adjusted rhythms. The body was not a canvas for self-creation. It was a vessel governed by laws, shaped by seasons, and infused with purpose.

Chopra’s world is unanchored. It offers the appearance of wisdom without the infrastructure. It borrows from traditions, but forgets their foundations. And it invites the seeker into a healing journey whose compass is for sale.

What began in the maristan as an act of justice, treating the sick according to cause and constitution, now risks becoming an act of consumption. The healer becomes a brand. The patient becomes a client. And the inner self, once mapped with precision, becomes a stage.

Chapter IV: A Science of Coherence

Restoring the Frame of Meaning and Healing

The popularity of Deepak Chopra’s work, and that of others like Joe Dispenza or the Monroe Institute, would not have emerged in a vacuum. Their rise marks a deeper absence. That absence is not of science or of spirituality, but of systems that once integrated both with coherence. These were systems that did not fragment the human being into parts, nor reduce healing to an algorithm of prescriptions. They saw the person as an ecosystem within ecosystems. They understood illness as a disturbance in balance, not just a mechanical failure.

Tibb is one of those systems. Chinese medicine is another. Siddha, Unani, and parts of Ayurveda share the same spirit. Each of these traditions worked with different cosmologies, but all shared a vital commitment: to observe patterns in the whole person, across time, across condition, and across landscape. They used structured diagnostic tools and personalized treatment methods. They recorded their findings with precision. And they trained their practitioners not merely to recite texts, but to observe, interpret, and respond to subtle shifts in behavior, skin tone, breath, appetite, and emotional temperament.

What Chopra presents as the quantum body already has a place in these traditions. In Tibb, it is understood as the jism latif, the subtle body, which interpenetrates the physical but is not reducible to it. This body houses the ruh, is influenced by the nafs, and responds to changes in mizaj — the individual temperament composed of the four qualities: hot, cold, moist, and dry. These qualities are not symbolic. They are observational. A dry temperament will affect the stools, the skin, the mood, and the voice. A hot temperament will raise pulse, induce agitation, and trigger inflammatory cascades. These patterns were charted and used to both diagnose and treat.

Presence and awareness are not absent from this framework. They are central to it. But presence is not given as a universal remedy. It is applied in context. Stillness may be medicine for a hot, moist state. But movement may be medicine for coldness and stagnation. The same principle that in Chopra’s work is offered as a sweeping tool is in Tibb used like a scalpel, carefully, after study.

The reason this comparison matters is not just to show that Chopra borrows from older systems. It is to show what he omits. When awareness is divorced from diagnosis, it becomes impression. When healing is separated from structure, it becomes performance. And when the body is seen only as potential, it is no longer treated as a vessel that requires care rooted in material limits.

The cost of this detachment is not only intellectual. It has consequences in public health, policy, and lived experience. Tibb, once a state-supported science of healing from Baghdad to Andalusia to Delhi, was methodically sidelined. Colonial powers, starting in the 18th century, began to erase its legitimacy. First, practitioners were banned from performing surgeries, even though figures like Al-Zahrawi had pioneered surgical instruments and methods still in use today. Next, they were banned from using what were classified as Grade 4 compounds, such as opium, morphine, or other plant-based analgesics. were prohibited from using what were categorized as Class IV compounds; substances like opium, morphine, and other potent plant derived analgesics. Which were critical to pain management during surgery. Tibb had long used them with great care, always adjusting dosage based on the patient’s temperament, age, mizaj, and recovery window.

But once these compounds were reclassified under modern pharmaceutical laws, they were removed from the Tibbi toolkit entirely. A practitioner could no longer perform surgery, because the patient could no longer be safely sedated. And because the use of these substances was now criminalized or regulated beyond the reach of traditional institutions, a whole spectrum of procedures became impossible.

Once this was done, government funding began to disappear. Maristans were shut down or converted. Academic training collapsed. Hospitals aligned themselves with colonial medicine. What remained of Tibb was relegated to family lines and scattered private practice, its pharmacological backbone removed and its institutional support dismantled.

While this was happening, modern biomedicine rapidly expanded. Pharmaceutical corporations began to industrialize the treatment of disease, isolating each symptom and designing drugs not to resolve root causes but to suppress expressions. Painkillers did not restore balance. They muted signals. Antidepressants did not address grief. They recalibrated neurotransmitters, often flattening the emotional range. Each new pill solved one issue while introducing another, so that the patient moved from one diagnosis to the next, always managed, rarely healed.

This is not simply an accusation. It is a pattern observable across decades of pharmaceutical expansion. Healing became a subscription model. The patient was no longer guided back to balance, but kept within managed thresholds. Wellness became a product. And coherence, the central feature of traditional systems, was lost.

It is in this vacuum that figures like Chopra appear. Their language is inviting. Their metaphors resonate. But they do not restore the lost grammar. They do not return us to systems. Instead, they offer experience without root. Sound baths, binaural sessions, affirmations, and presence rituals are sold as gateways to the self. But the self is not a disembodied field. It is a composite of motion, digestion, breath, pulse, memory, and history.

The maristan, in its time, was more than a hospital. It was an institution of justice. Patients were not charged. Physicians were salaried by the state. Care was not optimized for throughput but for return to function. Pulse diagnosis was not a forgotten art. It was a requirement. Treatments were integrated across body and soul. If one grieved too long, it was known the lungs would begin to constrict. If rage took hold, it was known that liver heat could rise to the head. These were not myths. They were observable consequences that shaped real interventions.

Modern systems have no language for such complexity. Chopra’s language gestures toward it but does not build it. Without mizaj, there is no differential. Without constitution, there is no precaution. Without seasonal variation, there is no modulation. Presence, in this form, becomes a script. The patient is told to close their eyes, to visualize possibility, to intend themselves into wellness.

But visualization is not enough. The body does not shift by suggestion alone. It shifts by cause, timing, nourishment, and rest. And these are not to be guessed. They are to be understood.

We do not need to invent new models. We need to remember what was discarded. Not to return out of nostalgia, but to reclaim what had coherence. A science of healing that recognized each person as a system, living among systems, governed by knowable rhythms, capable of repair.

This is what the maristan held. This is what systems like Tibb and Chinese medicine still hold, when allowed to breathe. The challenge before us is not to defend tradition as heritage, but to restore it as methodology. The body is not an abstract canvas. It is a structure. It signals. It remembers. And it can be read.

Healing begins when we learn to read it again.

References

Chopra, Deepak. Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.
The central work under critical review. Chopra introduces his notion of the "quantum body" and positions healing as arising from subtle, non-local fields of energy and consciousness.

Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine). Translated by Laleh Bakhtiar. Chicago: Kazi Publications, 2007.
A foundational medical encyclopedia of the Islamic Golden Age, detailing diagnostic frameworks, treatments, and the psychosomatic nature of illness across five books.

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. Tibb an-Nabawi (Medicine of the Prophet). Translated by Penelope Johnstone. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1998.
Outlines the Prophetic model of health and disease, drawing connections between behavior, diet, prayer, and physical balance in the human body.

Al-Razi (Rhazes). Kitab al-Hawi (The Comprehensive Book). Selected sections translated by various sources in Medieval Islamic Medicine by Peter E. Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Cited for his clinical methods and insistence on experimental observation alongside temperament-based medicine.

Al-Zahrawi (Albucasis). Kitab al-Tasrif (The Method of Medicine). Translated excerpts in Spink, M.S., and G.L. Lewis, Albucasis on Surgery and Instruments. London: The Wellcome Institute, 1973.
Referenced in discussions of the surgical tradition within Tibb before it was institutionally dismantled.

Pormann, Peter E., and Emilie Savage-Smith. Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Used to situate the maristan, institutional models of care, and the social role of physicians in classical Islamic civilization.