This paper departs from the usual approaches to rethinking health, most of which are based on opportunities to secure the sustainability of the healthcare system (4), to contain the tsunami of chronic diseases (5), to promote behaviour change (6), to deal with inequity, human right violations and other forms of injustice (7,8) or to usher in "precision medicine" (9,10). Similarly, the paper avoids more conventional paths to rethink well-being, which tend to focus on new opportunities to enhance human freedom and capabilities (11), to eliminate suffering (12), to "reassemble" power structures around labour (13) or the enhance human happiness (14).

Instead of jumping straight into proposing opportunities to improve human health and well-being in the near future, this paper will attempt to focus our attention first on what could arguably be our most fundamental challenges today: to value the need to devote time to reflecting upon the meaning of "health" and "well-being", to be able to handle the discomfort that we will experience as we discover previously invisible conceptual gaps, and to be capable of overcoming our resistance to free health and well-being from the influence that disease and unmet needs have exerted over them, fueled by the insidious way in which market forces and politics have colluded to cloud our thinking.

The starting point for this journey will be the definition of "health" used by the representatives of the member states of the United Nations who participated in the constitution of the World Health Organization in 1948. Such definition declared health to be "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not just the absence of disease or infirmity" (15). This was perhaps the first time in history in which health, disease and well-being were linked in a sentence, as part of a document designed to have global impact. Deceptively benign and seemingly aspirational, this definition, which has remained unchanged ever since, has a major problem: It condemns us all to be not healthy, as practically nobody could claim to have complete physical, mental and social well-being! Just by having dental cavities, wearing glasses, feeling tired or worried or hungry, worrying about a debt or an exam, a person could not be regarded as being healthy (16).

The WHO definition had another adverse effect: it gave well-being a subordinate role to health, a fact that has remained undisputed for more than 70 years, creating confusion as to what the word itself means, and how it really relates to health (17,18).