Chinese Medicine Is 75 Years Old

Most readers think Chinese medicine is 4,000 years old. The version you encounter is 75. Here's what got de-centered, where it persisted, and why the magick never actually left.

From The Magick That Never Left: Classical Chinese Medicine and the Tradition Still Beneath It

~15 minute read

This is chapter one of a serialized book. Start here, or jump ahead to chapter two. I practise this medicine for a living; the full credentials and the usual disclaimers are at the bottom. Anyone described here is changed and composited; every scene is an illustration, not a record of any real session.

So she comes in for a reading and I tell her, pick the tile closest to you, whatever tile, don't move it, leave it where it was, just flip. Mahjong tiles, right. Same game your grandma plays but also a divinatory tool depending who's sitting at the table. This is a more modern adaptation by the way, not ancient classical divination, but it works in my hands so I use it.

She flips. Three. I told her you get threes a lot in your life. She said yeah, three's actually her number. Three keeps popping for the whole reading too, generally going wild on threes.

I told her, your spirit guides, and that's a broad term I'm using, there's actually three ancestresses you should be working with. And this here, this says they've been trying to get to you in your dreams, you get pissed off that they bug you in your dreams, I think you actually wake up with night terrors occasionally. It's because you're not listening to them. Don't ask for a door to be open if you don't want it open, right. That's why I had to work with the dead here, because it's pretty clear your ancestors want to work with you and they got goods, but there's going to be some harsh lessons. It's coming from far back in the line.

And to be clear, recurring night terrors are also see-a-doctor territory, a sleep clinic if it keeps up. The tiles don't replace that, they never will.

I asked her where her family's from. Mountains or ocean. She said her dad's side is ocean, mom's side is mountain. That's what I thought. So this was all the maternal line, threes everywhere, Korean ancestresses on the mountain side. And they don't really sugarcoat anything in the readings, at least the mountain lines I've read for haven't. So this was them being polite about it. To be clear, I'm not claiming Muism credentials, the mudang have their own tradition and their own training, I'm reading what showed up in front of me with the tools I work with and pointing her back to her own line where it lives.

It was time for the shit or get off the pot moment. The ancestresses don't wait around forever, and if you don't show up they'll move to someone else down the line eventually. They got better things to do.

She told me she was preparing to start a business. She'd been training for years, didn't feel ready. I told her, you're never ready, that's not how this works, you don't get to feel ready for something like this. And what she was calling her business, that's not any different than actual Korean shamanic or magic work, she was just using a different language for it. The same family of work Korean shamans do with drums and chants and trance, though becoming a mudang is its own road, the sinbyeong, the naerim-gut initiation, a teacher, and I wasn't handing her any of that. The name had changed. The family of work hadn't.

The reading also threw out a folk-magick offering for her practice. Korean mountain ginseng for a Korean mountain woman, the tiles pointed at resonance with the line, a correspondence move from my own practice where you match the plant to the person's line, and that's my working logic, not a named Korean tradition. Correspondence work, not herbal medicine, those are different categories. She left with the reading and some homework.

What I'd done in that room wasn't fortune-telling, even though from the outside it probably looked like it. It was the kind of pattern reading classical CM did before that work got carved out into a separate category from clinical practice. Most people reading this wouldn't recognize it as Chinese medicine either, which makes sense, because what most people think Chinese medicine is, isn't really what it is.

How old is this really?

So this might be a kick to the face but here we go. Most people think Chinese medicine is thousands of years old. This is seriously old stuff, you'd think. Reality is, what you'd actually learn in a Canadian acupuncture college, that's about 75 years old as of writing this in 2026. It's really from the 1950s, so you can do the math on however many years it is by whenever you're reading this. About as old as some of your grandparents, depending on your age. When I teach the history segment in foundation of Chinese medicine, I usually open class with this and tell the students welcome to your 9:31am, I'm sorry I already broke all your dreams in the first ten minutes. Same energy for you, the reader, basically.

Most people, when you ask them, they're picturing classical Chinese medicine, not traditional Chinese medicine. There's a big difference on that. And when I say classical, I mean the tradition as it ran before the mid-century standardization, with the framing and the cultivation still attached to it. The label itself is modern, Heiner Fruehauf's more than anyone's, and I use it knowing that. I have to start with this because if I don't, well, it's just a whole lot of illusions you start building on for the rest of the conversation.

Real quick on the modern Canadian curriculum. It's roughly two to three years for acupuncture, no herbs in that scope at all. Herbs are the TCM practitioner credential, three to four years in Ontario and BC, with herbology being the additional year. You memorize 361 acupoints across the 12 primary channels plus Du Mai and Ren Mai, the four examinations (looking, listening and smelling, asking, palpation), yin-yang and five phases theory, zangfu pattern diagnostics, plus all the clinical subjects and modalities. Qigong and tai chi are in the curriculum as coursework (Yang style usually for tai chi), but typically as one or two courses rather than the daily cultivation practice they are in classical lineages. Hundreds of hours of student clinic before they let you graduate. It's a lot, basically.

That's the official curriculum. Unofficially, faculty bring lineage material into clinical instruction, Master Tung's points, Balance Method, methods from the parallel Japanese and Korean acupuncture traditions, medical qigong, Wu Yun Liu Qi calendrical acupuncture, bazi diagnostics, family-line technique adjustments, and plenty more depending on the instructor. Stuff that's not in the syllabus but every decent instructor brings in anyway.

So that's what TCM is. Comprehensive enough that you can actually treat patients, and it holds up in practice. But it's also a specific historical version of Chinese medicine, the post-war reform version, and that history matters for what comes next.

And a fair reader pushes back right here, so let me put their case properly instead of waiting for them to make it. The needles are old. The formulas are old. Channel theory, pulse diagnosis, the classics themselves, all old, and none of it was invented in 1955. Volker Scheid makes the serious version of this objection: Chinese medicine was always plural and always synthesizing, so there was never one unified thing sitting there waiting to be broken. That punch lands, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't. Here's the line I'd draw. What I'm dating isn't the medicine. It's the frame. The standardized curriculum, the vocabulary, the decisions about what stays in the textbook and what gets filed under folklore. The methods survived that. The frame around them is 75 years old, and the frame is what tells you what the methods are for.

So what happened?

This isn't how Chinese medicine always looked, and the political history's actually more layered than the diaspora version usually tells.

So in 1929 you had Nationalist health officials, who were more Western-influenced at the time, they actually approved a proposal to ban traditional medicine outright. There was this thing called the Abolition of Old Medicine proposal, drafted by Yu Yunxiu and passed on 25 February 1929 at the first Central Health Committee conference the Ministry of Health convened in Nanjing. Fourteen men sat in that room and none of them practised the medicine they were voting on. They saw the old medicine as backward and superstitious, basically. There was a real organized fight to keep it alive. On 17 March 1929, delegates from Chinese-medicine associations across fifteen provinces filled the great hall of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce, and the Nanjing government rescinded the abolition that December. That date became National Medicine Day. So the medicine survived, but only barely. Sean Hsiang-lin Lei's book Neither Donkey Nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle Over China's Modernity covers this Republican-era struggle in detail if you want to dig into the actual political history.

Then years later when the communists won the civil war, they did the opposite of that. the new government officially promoted Chinese medicine starting in 1950, the year the First National Health Conference set the policy of uniting Chinese and Western medicine, partly because the country was too poor for Western medicine and they had to care for hundreds of millions of people. Mao himself didn't speak at the conference, his contribution there was a written inscription calling for that unity, but in a 1950 statement he said: "Our nation's health work teams are large. They have to concern themselves with over 500 million people, including the young, old, and ill." The basic logic was that with so few Western-trained doctors, they had to rely on Chinese medicine to treat illness. Now this was a mix of pragmatic and political. Scaling Western medicine for 500 million people wasn't realistic given post-civil-war resources, and promoting TCM also worked as anti-imperialist signaling, indigenous Chinese knowledge versus Western medical dominance. So the public TCM promotion was state policy driven by resource constraints plus nationalist political utility, not ideological commitment to the tradition.

What's even more screwed up around this whole thing, Mao himself didn't actually believe in Chinese medicine. His personal physician Li Zhisui wrote about it in his memoir The Private Life of Chairman Mao, where he recounts Mao telling him directly: "Even though I believe we should promote Chinese medicine, I personally do not believe in it. I don't take Chinese medicine." That quote's been challenged by some Mao biographers for its sourcing, fair, it's a physician's memoir of a private conversation rather than a public document, but Li Zhisui's account is the most-cited English-language source on Mao's actual private views and it lines up with the broader pattern of his behaviour. So he was promoting Chinese medicine publicly while privately using Western medicine for his own care and telling his own doctor he thinks Chinese medicine is nonsense.

Then later, during the Cultural Revolution that kicked off in 1966, you got the Four Olds campaign, where they were going after Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas. And a lot of Chinese medicine got swept into that. This is documented stuff, not folk story, you can find it in academic medical history work like Miriam Gross's coverage of the period in the journal Medical History, plus Heiner Fruehauf's writing on it. Ancient medical tomes burned, family grave sites and lineage halls destroyed, medical lineage genealogies destroyed, and an extraordinary number of the elite elderly doctors, who were the actual repositories of the tradition, got persecuted, tortured, sometimes killed outright. To give you one illustrative example, historian Miriam Gross analyzed a commemorative collection of biographies of forty-six elite physicians in Jilin Province who were alive during the Cultural Revolution, and found that twenty-nine of them, 63%, recorded experiences that led to retirement, devastating illness, or death. That's one province's elite. Nationally, the number of Chinese medicine doctors went from 361,000 in 1959 down to 240,000 by 1977. So the medicine the state was officially promoting was simultaneously getting its core infrastructure dismantled in real ways. The people, the books, and the family trees that connected them, all three at once. That's the messy part most people don't tell you about.

After the Cultural Revolution wound down in the late 70s, there was a reconstruction effort. Heavy stuff to land on I know, but it matters for where the book goes. The elders who held the actual transmissions, a lot of them didn't make it through, and the lineages had to rebuild from what was left. Now this part is more lineage understanding than mainstream academic history, but the way my teachers tell it, a lot of what got pulled back together came from material that had been preserved outside mainland China. Korean Hanui and Japanese Kampo had kept records and texts, Vietnamese traditional medicine too, plus rural pockets in places like Yunnan and Sichuan that the destruction hadn't reached as fully. There's at least partial historical basis for the Korean piece specifically, works like the Treasured Mirror of Eastern Medicine (Dongui Bogam, (동의보감) genuinely preserved passages from earlier Chinese texts that were later lost in China, though to be precise that preservation happened at its compilation in 1613, and the book circulated in Chinese printings continuously ever since, so it's proof of Korean transmission holding material China lost, not a text China had to go retrieve after the Cultural Revolution. Academic accounts of the reconstruction tend to emphasize domestic recovery more than the diaspora-lineage version does, fair enough, both can be true at their levels. Kim Taylor's book Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China covers the political construction of TCM in detail if you want to dig in there.

What survived in the standardized curriculum is most of the methods, just reframed without their spiritual context. Familiar enough that people recognize it as some kind of medicine, but exotic enough that it still gets filed under alternative. Kind of like the panda, technically a bear but marketed as something else.

What got cut was the framing, not the methods

So when I talk about what got cut, what I mean is mostly the framing, not the methods themselves. That's an important distinction and worth being clear about upfront.

If you're a practitioner reading this and going, wait, plenty of these methods are still in mainland TCM, my teachers still teach Ling Gui Ba Fa, qigong is in the curriculum, what got cut exactly? Yeah, fair question. There's like four parts to this honestly, and it's subtler than it usually gets told.

So first thing, the methods themselves mostly survived. Acupuncture points, herbal formulas, channel theory, pulse diagnosis, all that stuff is still in the textbooks. Practitioners with lineage transmission migrated to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, North America, Europe, kept teaching the older material outside the mainland framework. Mainland TCM kept and developed plenty of classical methods too, things like Ling Gui Ba Fa and Zi Wu Liu Zhu timing acupuncture, classical moxa techniques, qigong work in hospital clinics. The methods are there if you train in the right stream basically.

Second thing, and this is the big one for me, the framing changed. Where classical CM held all of this inside a traditional Chinese cosmological and ritual context (Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and folk-religious strands all woven in depending on the lineage and the period), post-reform TCM holds it inside a Marxist-materialist and biomedical-adjacent context. Same points basically, but the cosmology around them got swapped out. Herbs in the formulas are the same too, the language describing what they're doing reads completely different though. Technique preserved, worldview wrapped around it swapped out.

Third one, and this matters a lot for the kind of work this book's about, the centrality of cultivation dropped. In the cultivation-central lineages this book comes out of, classical CM assumes the practitioner is doing their own internal work as a core requirement, qigong, meditation, ritual hygiene, dietary discipline, all of that, because the work runs through your body and some days it's a lot depending on what the client's going through. A car won't run without gas, right. Without cultivation, the work doesn't really run. Now not every classical practitioner did this kind of cultivation work, classical CM was diverse, scholar-physicians and folk practitioners had different relationships to it. But in the lineages where cultivation was central, that centrality is what got de-prioritized in the reform curriculum. The modern curriculum still teaches qigong sure, just as one or two courses rather than as the daily core practice it is in cultivation-central lineages, more supplementary than foundational basically. Most students treat cultivation as a side hobby they'll get around to eventually, and then they wonder why the work doesn't feel the way their teachers' did.

Fourth, and this is the one that doesn't get talked about much, the public naming of the magick went underground. The state doesn't officially endorse ritual or spirit or magick as part of clinical medicine, so classical methods that depend on those frames get either reframed in materialist language or quietly dropped from public curriculum. Some ritual practice does survive in regulated forms (state-recognized qigong, registered Daoist temples, some Buddhist medical contexts), but as part of the standardized medical curriculum, the magickal frame is not on the menu. The methods are there if you know to look, they're just not named for what they are anymore.

Here's one specimen so this doesn't stay up in the clouds. There's a set of thirteen points for treating what the tradition called ghost affliction. The Thirteen Ghost Points, 十三鬼穴, traditionally attributed to Sun Simiao, who we'll meet properly in the next chapter. These are real points. They're on the body you have right now. A standardized curriculum today will happily teach you several of them, good points, clinically useful, with the ghosts filed off. Same location, same needle, different universe basically. Nobody removed the points. They removed what the points were for, then taught the leftovers as the whole thing. That's the pattern, and once you see it in one place you start seeing it everywhere.

So when I say the magick they cut out, that's what I mean. Not the techniques, the techniques are still there. What got cut is the framing that held the techniques as magickal, the cultivation that activated them, and the public naming that said any of this out loud.

Lineage and apprenticeship are basically cheat codes for this stuff, but they don't play the game for you, you still have to put in the hours yourself.

Every pre-modern medicine system had some version of cosmological layers connected to clinical practice by the way, though they worked differently across cultures. European doctors did iatromathematics, Persian-Hellenistic medicine read star charts, different epistemic structures, but cosmology connected to medicine was widespread before modernity ironed it out. The specifically classical-CM version is that the cultivation infrastructure wasn't decorative, it was practitioner-attunement: the practitioner doing his own inner work so he shows up steadier, more present, more himself in the room. In the streams that kept that infrastructure central, practitioners describe the work as feeling different when their own cultivation is in order. I won't translate that into a claim that the same points produce different clinical outcomes depending on the practitioner, because that isn't something I can demonstrate and the research isn't there. This is practitioner observation, with all the self-report bias that carries. I offer it as a conviction about how the tradition was meant to be practised, not as a promise about results.

Here's the thing though. The same split runs right through the textbooks today, and it surfaces in the moments that actually matter. Those COVID hospitals that got built in Wuhan in early 2020, they were named Huoshenshan 火神山 and Leishenshan 雷神山, Fire God Mountain and Thunder God Mountain. These are folk-religious and Daoist deity names, the fire god and the thunder god. An influential stream of mainland TCM was classifying COVID at the time as cold-damp plague (寒湿疫), which is a yin pathogen pattern in TCM terms. That classification came out of Academician Tong Xiaolin's work and was adopted in the official Chinese government COVID treatment guidelines. Fire and thunder are yang energies. So you've got state medicine in an officially Marxist-Leninist political system naming new hospitals after yang deities while its own TCM doctors were diagnosing a yin pathogen, and the yang-counters-yin reading of those names circulated widely in China at the time, whatever the official rationale was. You can read the motives on that however you want, but the pattern's pretty clearly there.

Mao did the same thing himself by the way. Publicly, no superstition allowed in the new system. The folk record, and I'm telling you upfront it's folk record, unverifiable, says he consulted Daoist diviners on dates and numbers, kept his security unit under a number tied to a prediction about his life, and ran his big moves inside that framework anyway. I pass it along because even as a story it's telling: that's the shape people who lived under the system remember it having.

So when we get to the chapters on bazi diagnostics, ritual intervention, channel narratives, all the stuff that follows, don't file any of that under the magick department for me. The standardized curriculum names some of it and not the rest, but the rest is still part of the tradition. Both versions are Chinese medicine, the standardized and the classical, they just aren't doing the same job. Same tradition, different operating modes, the classical mode just keeps more of itself switched on basically, more of the framing and cultivation in the room. To be clear that's a claim about how complete the version is, not a promise about what any given treatment will do. The buffet's open, the food's safe. But the rest of this book is going to be about the secret menu, the stuff that isn't really mainstream but is in the kitchen if you know to ask.

Same world either way, just two eyes looking at you, doesn't really matter which one you focus on, you're still looking at the same face anyway.

Next chapter: The Magick Was Never the Add-On. By the Yuan dynasty, "charms and spells" wasn't folk practice on the margins, it was a tested subject of state medicine, sitting on the official exam right next to acupuncture. Receipts included.

The Secret Menu Index. One page: everything the standardized curriculum dropped, renamed, or de-framed, and where each piece went. Free, by email. Get it here.

The Secret Menu is the paid tier of this book, the operative side of the work that doesn't go in the free chapters. It opens soon at $25 a month, and the email list gets it first.

A few things before you go

A quick note on everything you just read. This is a personal essay about the history, philosophy, and spiritual side of Chinese medicine, not medical advice and not a description of treatment I sell. The divination, ritual, and cultivation work I describe is spiritual practice, not regulated healthcare, and nothing here is offered as a treatment result. The people described are changed and composited; no person described corresponds to any identifiable individual, and every scene is an illustration, not a record of any real session. In Ontario, acupuncture is a regulated health service, delivered without supernatural claims and with no guaranteed results; divination, Reiki, Qigong, and ritual are separate, are not regulated health services, and are not offered to diagnose, treat, or cure any condition.

I'm writing this as a working practitioner first and foremost. Quick on the credentials so you know where I'm coming from.

On the TCM side, my education is through a CTCMPAO-accredited acupuncture program, that's what my R.Ac registration is built on. Outside that regulated education, I've also trained with teachers in Daoist medical and imperial-acupuncture lineages who'd rather not be named publicly. To be clear, that's personal, supplementary lineage study, not a formal credential and not a claim to any acupuncture specialty or expertise beyond my R.Ac registration. The College registers the R.Ac (and the TCM practitioner title); it doesn't certify "lineage" anything, and I'm not suggesting otherwise.

On the cultivation side, I'm a Master of Medical Qigong (trained under Robert Youngs at IIMQ Canada), holder of Mao Shan Shangqing transmission (direct master-to-student, not institutional ordination), plus Daoist folk-magick practice.

On the broader magick side, my primary teacher and spiritual guru is Andrieh Vitimus, and through his training I'm a chaos magician, work in Wu shamanic practice (combined with my own family ancestor work, Cantonese with northern roots), and work with Tangmi material (Tang Dynasty esoteric Buddhism, modern reconstruction stream rather than unbroken Shingon-line transmission, since the original Tangmi transmission lines in China were broken up in the Huichang persecution that peaked in 845 CE).

I'm not a historian and I'm not a translator. There are practitioners who trained in mainland China, or with mainland-trained teachers, who'll tell you a different story than this one, and they're not wrong, they just trained in a different stream.

Quick note on scope. I'm registered as an R.Ac with CTCMPAO in Ontario, and my regulated practice operates under their scope. This book is about the broader Chinese medicine tradition, which is larger than what any single regulatory curriculum covers. A lot of what people think of as separate from "real" Chinese medicine, the cultivation work, the diagnostic pattern recognition that goes beyond pulse and tongue, the cosmological frame around the points, is actually part of the original tradition. Practitioners with classical training have always brought more of that depth into their clinical work, within whatever scope of practice applies to them in their jurisdiction. The book is about that depth, what it is, where it went, and how the tradition's full toolkit reads differently than the standardized version of it. Folk-magick herbal correspondences aren't herbal medicine prescription by the way, that's a different category needing a different designation, and the book is careful about that distinction throughout.

There's serious historical scholarship on all of this, and the reading list below has it. Heiner Fruehauf's Classical vs Traditional distinction is the position closest to my own framing, and the post-1949 record is well documented at this point, Kim Taylor, Volker Scheid, Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Paul Unschuld, plus Liu Lihong from mainland China, this just isn't that kind of book I'm writing.

What I care about most is whether the medicine works in the room. That's it really. The history matters to me because it explains why I practise the way I do, with the cultivation and the framing kept in rather than set aside. I want to be careful how I put the next part, because it's a conviction, not a measured result. My own sense, working the way my lineage trained me, is that the framing and cultivation that got de-centered weren't decorative culture, they were the load-bearing part of the tradition, the part that made the whole thing cohere. I'm not claiming one training produces better clinical outcomes than another, and I couldn't prove that if I tried. Different practitioners come up through different streams and land in different places, and that's fair. As one of my teachers used to say, can you get results in the room, that's what it comes down to. Medicine is medicine.

And when I say the fuller streams, that's a preference talking, not a ranking. Plenty of excellent practitioners work entirely inside the standardized frame and get results I don't. I'd rather keep more of the tradition on the table. That's my taste, and I'm not dressing it up as history.

One more thing about the title, since it's an absolute and this book keeps asking other people to be careful with those. The magick never actually left is a claim about the tradition, not about every corner of it. Plenty of streams did let it go, on purpose, and kept practising well. What I mean is narrower: it survived somewhere, in enough places, that the line back to it is still walkable. That's what the rest of the book is trying to show.

The rest of this book is just one practitioner's reading of his own tradition.

Want to dig into the actual record

If you want to read the academic sources I'm working from, here's where I'd point you.

For the Cultural Revolution destruction specifically, Miriam Gross has a 2018 paper in Medical History called "Between Party, People, and Profession: The Many Faces of the 'Doctor' during the Cultural Revolution" that covers it in detail with the actual numbers, that's where the Jilin stats and the national physician decline came from. Kim Taylor's Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945–1963: A Medicine of Revolution from RoutledgeCurzon is the canonical text on the post-1949 political construction of TCM. For the 1929 Yu Yunxiu fight and the Republican-era struggle generally, Sean Hsiang-lin Lei's Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity is the one to read.

Volker Scheid's Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis covers what's actually happening in mainland practice now and how plural it really is, his framing leans more on the synthesis side than mine but worth knowing. Bridie Andrews has The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 if you want the broader pre-1949 history and context for how the modernization debate started.

For the Classical Chinese Medicine vs Traditional Chinese Medicine distinction specifically, Heiner Fruehauf's 1999 piece "Chinese Medicine in Crisis: Science, Politics, and the Making of TCM" in Journal of Chinese Medicine is the foundational essay, that's the one closest to my own framing.

On Mao's private views, Li Zhisui's The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician from Random House 1994 is the source for the "I personally do not believe in it" quote, and again, that's been challenged so use the appropriate hedging. Alan Levinovitz wrote a more accessible piece in Slate in 2013 called "Chairman Mao Invented Traditional Chinese Medicine. But He Didn't Believe in It" if you want a shorter read on it.

A note on method. I don’t read Chinese. Everything classical in this book comes to me through translation, mainly Unschuld and Harper, and where I quote a rendering I name whose it is. Characters I check against a character dictionary rather than a TCM textbook, because the textbooks repeat each other and that’s how a bad gloss travels. I’d rather you know the limits of the tools than assume I have ones I don’t.

For the COVID cold-damp plague classification, Yujiao Zheng and Tong Xiaolin's team published "Understanding COVID-19 in Wuhan From the Perspective of Cold-Dampness: Clinical Evidences and Mechanisms" in Frontiers in Medicine in 2021 that lays out the diagnostic and treatment frame.

Next: The Magick Was Never the Add-On