Eastern philosophy guru Deepak Chopra says he has one way to reform our sorry state of health care: by reconnecting with our spiritual side.

Once we do that, he said, we'll alter the structure of our brains, optimize our genetic functioning and stop taking so many unnecessary medications.

Chopra calls this the biology of happiness and expounds on it in his latest book, "Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul," which he'll discuss Monday at the downtown Missouri Athletic Club, then at the St. Louis Ethical Society.

In a phone interview, Chopra said that what we think and how we feel physically change our brains and bodies. He pointed to research on neuropeptides, which are protein-like molecules used by brain cells to communicate information to one another.

Thinking a thought or feeling an emotion, he said, causes a synapse to fire neuropeptides, not just to other brain cells, but to cells throughout the body including the immune system. Once a cell receives a neuropeptide, he added, its information changes that cell down to the genetic level.

"Now we're starting to see that how you behave, how you think, your personal relationships, social interactions, environment, diet, stress levels, they all modulate the activities of your genes," he said. "So what you think can change your genes and the structure of your brain."

Our relationship with time also affects our brains and bodies, because if you think you're running out of time your biological clock speeds up, he says. Connecting with our souls through love, passion, kindness, joy and so on does more than any drug to improve our health, because it "optimizes and up-regulates genes." Meditating helps with this, he says.

Chopra maintains that each year, Americans spend $700 billion on meds they don't need and surgeons perform 5 million unnecessary surgeries.

"If we just paid attention to those two things we could end the health care reform debate and stop filling out insurance forms," he said. "We, the supplier, create our own demand."

Chopra is a medically trained endocrinologist and former chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital during the 1970s. He said he quit traditional medicine because "we were acting like legalized drug pushers and prolonging suffering."

Since then, he's written 50 books, many of which have become best-sellers, and has built a loyal following including several celebrities. In a 1996 feature story, Time Magazine lauded him as having "done more than anyone else in the U.S. to create a vocabulary for the intersection of faith and medicine."

But Chopra also has critics. Dr. Stephen Barret, author of "The Health Robbers: A Close Look at Quackery in America," has noted that Chopra's theories aren't up for peer-review.

Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society, recently told NBC News that what Chopra does bothers a lot of scientists.

"It isn't his summary of recent scientific findings that is the problem," Shermer said. "It is in the extrapolation from recent data and tentative conclusions that scientists cautiously draw from those data where Deepak goes too far."