 There is long-standing debate in health policy over exactly how successful the biomedical model has been over its relatively short historical trajectory. The growth of the biomedical model in Western countries occurred at the same time as other social and economic transformations (industrialization, urbanization, globalization, etc.) and at the same time as improvements in life expectancy and a large number of disease outcomes. The ‘received view’ of these historical relations is that social and economic changes allowed the growth of biomedicine, which in turn created new institutions, professional health care practices, and technologies that, in turn, caused vast improvements in health outcomes for the populations served by biomedical institutions. Penicillin is the go-to example for illustrating the positive health impacts of biomedicine (Löwy 2011). It is a medicine extracted from nature (mold), made into a widely available ‘magic bullet’ thanks to biomedical techniques of identifying its active components, and manufacturing controlled doses of it at reasonable cost at massive scale. Suffering and death from bacterial infections was rapidly alleviated; once hopeless diseases were suddenly curable with a few (usually) benign pills.