Creighton University School of Medicine. Chief resident in anesthesiology at the University of California, San Francisco, with further training at Harvard Medical School and UCLA. Board certified in anesthesiology and pain management. In 1987, the University of Arizona's teaching hospital in Phoenix recruited him to found its Acupuncture, Stress Medicine, and Chronic Pain program, one of the first complementary medicine pain programs in America. He had kept a daily practice of Kundalini yoga and meditation since 1978, and he ran the clinic the way he ran his life. Western discipline, Eastern tools, whatever verifiably helped the patient.

In that clinic he watched chronic stress and pain grind down memory and clarity, and he watched patients with failing memory sent home with sympathy instead of a plan. There is still no pharmaceutical cure for Alzheimer's. In 1993, he and his wife Kirti founded the Alzheimer's Research and Prevention Foundation to study prevention while almost no one else would. In 1997 he wrote the landmark book arguing that memory loss is not a fixed part of growing older. In 2003, Congress asked him to explain the evidence.

Kirti directed regulatory affairs inside a multinational pharmaceutical company. She serves alongside Dr. Dharma, still the foundation's founding president and medical director, as its chief executive, and she has taught yoga to seniors for thirty years. Between the two of them, they know both systems from the inside.