 While a naturalistic concept of disease is the most consistent with the ontological assumptions and methodological practices of biomedicine, that has not prevented biomedicine from accommodating a certain type of dissent from the biomedical tenet that biomedicine ought to focus on diseases and (only) the biological, chemical, and physical aspects thereof (Krieger 2011: 130). The World Health Organization (WHO)—founded in the same post-World War Two period as biomedicine—adopted a holistic positive concept of health at its founding. i.e., it said that health is the presence of complete well-being (including mental and social well-being) rather than just the absence of disease. This created a direct tension with the core tenets of biomedicine, especially the reduction of disease to a set of concrete observable and measurable physical bases (Valles 2018). Historically, the tension was resolved in the case of the WHO by the organization, shortly after its founding, effectively self-suppressing the use of its own definition of health in favor of pursuing a narrower set of initiatives to combat particular diseases (e.g., the celebrated Smallpox Eradication Program) (Irwin &amp; Scali 2007). This seems to have been in part because cold war politics made it pragmatic to not antagonize the United States with pushing a health concept concerned with “social” well-being, sounding a bit reminiscent of socialism (Irwin &amp; Scali 2007). While a WHO-type understanding of health is in genuine tension with the philosophical tenets of biomedicine, the tension is manageable in this case by simply pursuing areas of overlap between the different conceptions of disease (e.g., investing in infectious disease-control strategies for a population) while ignoring any purported aspects of health beyond the absence of pathologies (e.g., declining to invest in assessing how human-environment relations contribute to a population’s happiness or misery).