From a neurologist who diagnosed her own brain tumor, Invisible No More empowers patients with chronic and complex illnesses to take their health into their own hands.

Invisible No More by Ilene Sue Ruhoy, MD, PhD was so informative.
I really enjoyed devouring this book.

Millions of people live with Long Covid and other chronic illnesses. I am one, so I was very interested in checking out this book. Sadly, I have mixed feelings on it.

Dr. Ruhoy shares her own experiences of living with chronic illness, and her background as a neurologist provides added credibility to the book, and it also offers an insider's perspective. It contains a bit of medical history, her autobiography, and tips on trying to navigate the healthcare system, nutrition, and breathwork. The intent of this book is to better equip patients to advocate for themselves.

The author does give a lot of information on possible "treatments" to try, such as supplements, integrative medicine, and alternative therapies. While these may be helpful to some readers, they may be cost prohibitive for many people living with chronic illness. The author also mentions some things which could be considered pseudoscience, so there are mixed opinions on their effectiveness.

Ruhoy shares a lot of stories, but she does infuse a number of tips, as well as her medical knowledge, into this book. And much of it could be helpful for those living with chronic illness when they are trying to navigate their journey through the healthcare system. Unlike other books I have read, this book is unique in the fact that the author is both a medical professional and a patient. Therefore, she does have a lot of insight into what she is saying, including her critiques of the healthcare system when it comes to helping patients navigate diagnoses. She explains how she, personally, works with her patients. But unfortunately, the average reader is unlikely to easily find a medical professional who may be as diligent as the author is in this regard.

Sadly, there was a bit more information on the author's personal journey than on how to navigate this road for the average patient than I was expecting based on the title and summary. However, there is a great deal of information that could be helpful to users, so if you live with a chronic illness, it may be worth checking out this book.

If you're newly diagnosed with a chronic illness, then INVISIBLE NO MORE will absolutely validate your feelings. You'll feel seen and understood, which is a gift for anyone who has been told variations of "it's all in your head."

But if you've been struggling within the medical system for any length of time, then there isn't much new here.

Ruhoy offers some helpful information, such as what exactly is happening in a body with autoimmune disease. A lot of the treatment advice, as is typical with this type of book, only helps if you're wealthy enough to pay hefty out-of-pocket expenses for treatments not covered by insurance. Because the truth is that our "conventional" medical system does nothing to help chronically ill people.

Most of us don't share Ruhoy’s privileges. Most of us are exhausted, mentally and physically. We're swimming in brain fog. We're drowning in debt. And the very people we're supposed to trust to help us—doctors—are responsible for blowing us off, beating us down, and labeling us as "difficult," as if our body's failure is our own fault.

When respected doctors like Ruhoy (a neurologist) develop an "invisible" illness, and they can't get their fellow professionals to listen, where does that leave the average person?

I think, rather than writing books for those who are sick and struggling, it would be more helpful for doctors who have experienced this madness to write books meant to educate their fellow doctors. Change the system from within, because sick people can't be expected to constantly fight to be heard.

And that's my soapbox rant for today.

*Thanks to St. Martin’s Essentials for the free copy!*

This book does a beautiful job of validating the emotional and physical toll of living with chronic illness, including long COVID. Dr. Ruhoy writes with compassion and understanding, and I really appreciated how she introduces more holistic ways of thinking about treatment options. This can be especially helpful for people who feel overlooked or dismissed by traditional medical approaches. For me, my experience with chronic illness didn’t begin with long COVID. I was born with my conditions, so I came to this book with a slightly different perspective. If you’ve been living with chronic illness for a while, you might not find a lot of brand new information here. But for someone who is new to this journey, there is a lot to take away and some great first steps toward understanding and healing. If you’re having trouble getting your doctor to understand what you’re going through, this book could be a great tool to bring with you to appointments. It offers helpful insight and suggestions that could open the door to more supportive conversations. This book isn’t the ultimate guide to treatment, and I can say that from personal experience. But it is a strong and validating place to start. For many, just feeling seen and heard is already a huge part of the battle.

⭐⭐.5

Pre-Read Notes:
I tend to read books about disability and chronic illness. In this case I think the perspective is interesting, as this book is written by Ilene Sue Ruhoy, MD, PhD, a disabled physician specializing in neurology. This seems like a good fit to me.

"Denial and suppression were a big deal in my family during my childhood , and that is what I was used to, and I guess that is where I was comfortable. Deny it and it does not exist. Oh, but it does. Suppress it and it goes away. But it doesn’t. You just don’t have to face it until it grows into a big, angry monster that is now a way more formidable foe." p69

Final Review

This book doesn't really cover any new ground regarding the care and treatment of complex and chronic illness. After becoming disabled by a seemingly ordinary infection, Dr. Ruhoy realized her colleagues ceased treating her like a cohort and started treating her like she was invisible, often blaming her complaints on stress and anxiety. She couldn't help but notice they all shared the same basic existence as she did and only she was experiencing a slow onset of multiple disabling symptoms. Any yet, her colleagues continued diagnosing her life and not her health.

What the book hopes is that Dr. Ruhoy will bring some kind of legitimacy to her experiences-- that being both a doctor and a thoroughly informed patient in the US healthcare system would make readers listen who might otherwise not do so. She's experienced her fair share of being ignored and silenced as a patient. But this whole concept suggests something very sad about both the doctors and the patients forced to use a system in which neither one trusts the other or the system that forces them together.

For me, this one is only okay and I have a lot of quibbles with it. Probably most importantly, she charges chronically ill patients to defeat the worst aspects of the US medical system with sheer positivity. You, too, can feel better, if you just become a doctor and convince *your* doctor to listen to and respect you! It would be funny if it wasn't so ableist and blindly privileged.

Dr. Ruhoy recommends many different kinds of treatments for symptoms of chronic illness, but many of these, like Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy and something called Vesper Therapy (which sounds like torture to me), are inaccessible both in cost and practicality. So I wouldn't say this book has accessibility in mind, nor is it written for the population that needs it most. If you have the inclination and budget to make yourself fresh pressed juice multiple times a day, then this book is for you-- unless you are one of many people with disability or chronic illness who needs to avoid sugar, fodmaps, gluten, or any number of other ingredients in her juices.

My 3 Favorite Things:

✔️ It was validating for me at first, as someone who has a complicated relationship with the medical system, to hear Dr. Ruhoy discussing feeling invisible in her appointments with other doctors, some of whom were her colleagues. I was not surprised to hear how much pushback she experienced, even as an accomplished neurologist. In that capacity, she represents to the doctor someone untrustworthy-- a patient.

✔️ I think it's good to shine a spotlight on long Covid. I remember a similar fight for recognition on the parts of individuals with chronic Lyme disease decades ago, and now it is widely accepted that Lyme disease does have a chronic expression. The only way we can change the landscape is to first identify the parts need changing.

✔️ A lot of good general help for wellness here, like recommended vitamins and supplements. She seems sensitive to the needs of people with dietary needs but never acknowledges fodmaps and recommends several food that are not fodmap safe.

Notes:

1. Content Notes: Covid, infectious disease, chronic conditions, descriptions of surgery, doctors, hospitals, diet culture, fasting, juicing

Thank you to the author Ilene Sue Ruhoy, MD, PhD, publishers St. Martin's Press, and NetGalley for an accessible digital arc of INVISIBLE NO MORE. All views are mine.

As a complex, chronic patient with many of the conditions referred to in the book, I cried so much while reading this. I felt validation, I felt connection, I felt understood. I cried for the author when she received her tumor diagnosis, knowing it would’ve been better had a doctor listened to her and ordered an MRI earlier. I’ve had similar experiences and it’s devastating. I appreciate this book very much!

I have POTs, and I got it from long COVID. Reading this made me feel a lot less alone. It mentions POTs, which I was rather happy about, and mentioned in the how to help section a lot of things I'd never considered, but also some things I had, and even things I'd already been doing that I didn't realize had a name, and that were helping me immensely. I tend to eat breakfast, and then dinner, and I didn't know that was not only considered intermittent fasting, but that it helps keep a POTs patients body functioning better because less blood is allocated to the stomach to aid in digestion, which means more blood has the ability to travel where it needs to. There were also recipes to help combat certain symptoms, and I think I'm going to be utilizing these a lot. I'm always looking for great recipes, things to try to help combat and ease my pains. It's nice knowing that someone in the medical industry understands what it's like to not be taken seriously or to have something hard to diagnose.

i have very mixed feelings about this book. on one hand, i think there are parts that would be incredibly helpful for someone recently diagnosed with a lingering or chronic illness. or even for someone who has been seeking understanding for their health symptoms and decline and doesn’t know what exactly is going on. i also found the authors own story incredibly interesting and insightful. unfortunately, at some point this book took a turn for me.

some of the treatment options recommended teetered on pseudoscience which makes me uncomfortable. it can be hard to hear when you’re already dealing with an illness many don’t acknowledge to then be presented with a magical juice that is supposed to provide relief, even from medical exposure to radiation! a book like this would have greatly benefitted with citing (in detail) some genuine studies with tangible answers as to how and how much those things can help some patients. there are studies in footnotes but the specific data taken from them isn’t outlined for the reader. seeing as the average person does not have the knowledge or skill to read a medical study and genuinely understand and critically consume it against similar trials, it seems like not enough to me.

being in and interacting with the chronically ill community it’s become clear to me that some people target us with the prospect of some alternative to medicine that will make things better. like if we only fasted long enough or tried this unregulated supplement it would be better.

unfortunately, that’s not how any of this works. and although lifestyle changes absolutely can make a huge difference in quality of life, it’s not ever going to be “enough.” i think the parts of this book that focused on validation and understanding were the strongest by far and the most useful for people affected by these conditions.

Thank you to Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for an advanced copy of this book.

Dr. Ilene Ruhoy has created a much-needed resource for many suffering from chronic illnesses. Dr. Ruhoy is extremely knowledgeable and adds in her personal experiences with adversity in dealing with a chronic illness. The book is partitioned into three major sections: Part 1 - Something is Not Right, Part 2 - Strategies for Recovery, Part 3 - Determination and Diligence. The writings give a lot of clinical information and data that is relevant to a variety of chronic illnesses, including Long-Covid, Connective Tissue disorders, Auto-immune diseases, Neurological diagnoses, and many more. The abundance of strategies and useful information in guiding the reader towards better health include topics such as nutrition, movement, oxygen and breathing, sleep and the circadian rhythm, regenerative therapies, and the environment (impacts on health). I highly recommend this book to everyone, because in our society today, if we are not dealing with some type of health issue as stated above, we definitely know someone who is, and the content learned in this book is life-changing! Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

Firstly, thank you so much to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for this honest review.

I was immensely excited to see this title coming to press, as the topic – Long COVID and chronic illness – are at the front of mind for me as a person who has struggled with both. I went into this book hoping that the title was an accurate summary of the book’s content and that the writer being a neurologist would lend some legitimacy to Long COVID, a disability which many people often downplay, ignore, or worse yet, claim is made up.

The book is split into three parts, each meaning to give a primer on the topics, some strategies for recovery, and then the importance of staying diligent on your road to recovery. I was surprised to read the first section, which was less focused on the background of Long COVID and chronic illnesses, but instead gave quite a thorough history on the author’s own struggle with chronic illness, more specifically her bout with brain cancer and the ensuing difficult recovery she experienced. While it was interesting to read this firsthand account, it seemed positioned more so as a means of giving her narrative legitimacy on the topic as a cancer survivor.

The remainder of the book did not, from my perspective, focus much on Long COVID and was also selective on which chronic illnesses were mentioned. Much of the content within the middle section focused on recovery strategies was written generally enough to potentially be applied to any number of chronic illnesses. I did see some of mine mentioned – namely, POTS, hyper-mobility spectrum disorder, and CFS – which was appreciated. It did, however, leave me wondering which other chronic illnesses were left out of consideration and why.

The more I read this, the more I believed that this book would mostly, if not exclusively, be helpful to highly wealthy white people who are invested in “wellness culture” and a bootstraps approach to the medical field. The encouragement I read in this book – to starve oneself for most of the day (called “intermittent fasting” by its proponents), go to the grocery store 4+ times a week for ingredients to drink juice every morning, not talk on a cell phone for more than 3 minutes at a time, turn off one’s wifi overnight to “reduce radiation exposure,” and jump into a series of involving exercises despite having a condition in which post-exposure malaise and intense pain is experienced post-workout – was enough to make me realize this was not the book I needed nor wanted to read.

Most, if not all, of the focuses on potential recovery avenues in this book are astronomically expensive, difficult to access even for ill folks who are lucky enough to be believed by doctors, not covered by insurance, and likely impractical with most folks’ schedules and lifestyles. For example, there was a chapter devoted to regenerative therapies in which none of the suggested interventions were affordable nor offered in traditional medical means. Stem cell replacement? Hyperbaric oxygen therapy? Plasmapheresis? And of course, this was followed by the author declaring, “Its important, though, not to look at these as shortcuts to replacements for the lifestyle strategies discussed earlier in the book. There is no replacement for healthy living: smart diet, good sleep, activity and (if you are able) exercise, going outside and being exposed to light and abundant oxygen.” So, I felt like the narrative came to a roadblock: either seek interventions known as “shortcuts” for those privileged enough to afford them, or those of us too sick and exhausted to get out of bed every day are to blame for our lack of energy in the first place.

I would not recommend this book, particularly if you are a person impacted by chronic illness and/or disability, nor if you are someone interested in learning more about the topic. There are lots of other titles focused on first-person experiences with illness which are less likely to be victim blaming, ableist, or very detached from the average person’s capabilities.

This review will be posted at the below GoodReads account after May 17, 2025 (one month prior to publication).

Dr. Ruhoy is a neurologist and a toxicologist, as well as a chronic pain sufferer herself. She is uniquely positioned to write this book on how to work with your healthcare provider in getting the best possible care. Nutrition, supplements, medications, sleep, movement, and breathing are discussed as critical to recovery. Information on Long COVID is also included. Dr. Ruhoy offers knowledgeable help and hope for the person with chronic pain!