About Dr. Robin Mayfield, DC, ACN

I didn’t grow up planning to become a doctor.

Honestly, I grew up almost the opposite way. I was born in the Fort Worth area back when it was still quite rural living outside of town. My father was tough, gruff, fiercely independent, and very much of the opinion that expressing pain or emotion was a sign of weakness. Doctors also cost money we didn’t have, so unless something was really wrong, you didn’t go. You just got over it. If something was bleeding, maybe you considered getting help. Or maybe you rubbed a little dirt in it.

(Some of you know exactly the kind of childhood I’m talking about.)

There were certainly downsides to that philosophy, but it also gave me something I didn’t appreciate until many years later: I learned to trust my body. You hurt yourself and eventually you got better. You got sick and eventually you got better. I had injuries from rodeo in junior high and high school, some of which would probably have caused a more sensible child to reconsider her hobbies, and somehow this body of mine kept recovering.

Long before I knew anything about natural medicine, physiology, chiropractic, nutrition, or any of the things I would eventually spend my life studying, I had developed a basic faith that the body was designed to heal. I just didn’t have those words for it yet.

I thought whatever my body did was normal.

As a teenager, I was basically healthy and can't remember going to a doctor for much of anything, which certainly didn’t mean that everything was ideal. I had severe constipation, heavy bleeding with my periods, insomnia and low self-esteem. I was always just overweight enough to feel bigger than my girlfriends, although what I didn’t know then was that I had PCOS and unusually high testosterone that influenced the way my body developed.

And I was a dork. I didn’t fit in because I was a “cowgirl” in a high school that had become urban almost overnight. (I wasn't actually called a “cowgirl,” but the real high school name for the rodeo club isn't fit for public consumption here.)

I simply assumed all of this was normal because it was normal for me.

Some of it was almost comically explainable in hindsight. My mother made wonderful freshly brewed loose-leaf iced tea, and I would drink three or four big glasses of highly caffeinated tea throughout the evening, then lie awake unable to sleep. Nobody connected those dots, certainly not me. I just thought I was someone who couldn't fall asleep.

That experience has stayed with me professionally because we become accustomed to ourselves. We can live with something for five, ten or twenty years and eventually stop thinking of it as a symptom at all; it becomes “just the way I am.” Sometimes it is. Sometimes there is a reason worth finding.

My first experience with medicine left me with a question.

In my twenties, I finally went to a doctor because I was concerned about my weight. He prescribed Synthroid, I took one bottle and noticed absolutely nothing, and at my follow-up I told him it hadn’t done anything. It was only then that he explained I would need to take it for the rest of my life. I remember thinking, What?

I had absolutely no medical training at that point, but something about that didn’t make sense to me. What exactly were we fixing? I think I probably laughed or scoffed, maybe both. I said "no thank you" and didn’t take it again.

I didn’t know that question—What are we actually fixing?—would follow me throughout my career.

Not long afterward, medicine became much more personal when my mother developed leukemia, then lymphoma. Watching someone you love become seriously ill changes the way you see healthcare. From where I stood as her daughter, I saw enormous attention being paid to the disease and treating what was happening to her, but I didn’t see nearly as much attention being paid to making the person herself healthier. She died within three years of her diagnosis.

I don’t tell that story because I believe natural medicine could necessarily have saved my mother; I could never know that. I tell it because losing her changed the questions I was willing to ask. What makes a person healthy in the first place? What allows one body to recover while another struggles? What happens before disease becomes disease? What roles do nutrition, stress, environment, emotions, genetics, physiology, relationships and the way we live our lives actually play? And what does healing mean when curing is not possible?

Those questions became very real for me.

What are we actually fixing?

From computer systems to human systems

My first career was as a software analyst. On paper, and in my bank account, it was a perfectly respectable career, but in reality I was bored out of my mind. I was also working for a huge, faceless corporation where every morning I drove an hour through traffic so I could arrive at 8:00. Sometimes I arrived to discover there was absolutely nothing meaningful that needed to be done, but I had to be there at 8:00 because, well, it was 8:00. The whole thing began to feel pointless and soulless to me.

I had grown up in a family where independence was valued above almost everything else, and somehow I had created a life that gave me very little of it. Then my chiropractor told me about a local chiropractic college that had recently become accredited, and something clicked. I thought, I could do this.

In retrospect, I didn’t leave my first career as completely as I thought I did. The analytical part of my brain came right along with me, because computer analysis had allowed me to troubleshoot, find patterns, trace problems backward, recognize relationships, and keep looking when the obvious answer didn’t solve the problem. I just found the human body infinitely more interesting than a computer system.

That same way of thinking eventually became central to the way I practice. I want to know why one symptom appeared before another, what happened around the time something began to change, why a lab result doesn’t quite fit the rest of the picture, or why one treatment helped one problem but unexpectedly changed something else. I don’t necessarily assume that every odd detail matters, but I don’t like throwing one away simply because I don’t yet understand where it fits.

While patients have told me that my superpower is diagnostics. I think what they are really describing is my persistence in wanting the whole story to make sense. And my willingness to not know everything, and to listen.

Becoming the kind of doctor I would trust

When I chose this path, I made a promise to myself that I wanted to become the kind of doctor I would trust with my own health, and more than three decades later that idea still guides me.

My education certainly didn’t end with my degrees. Thousands of hours of continuing education have taken me through functional medicine, clinical nutrition, hormone health, gut health, skincare from the inside out, acupuncture, herbs, homeopathy, chiropractic, physiology, emerging laboratory testing and many other areas. Over all those years, I’ve also had to change my mind plenty of times as better information came along. I can appreciate emerging science without assuming that everything old is obsolete. Mostly, I want to know what is useful and what makes sense for the individual person in front of me.

And I listen. Really listen, because after more than 35 years in practice, I’ve learned that patients often know something is wrong long before anyone has given them the language to explain it. They may not know exactly what is wrong, and sometimes the thing they are convinced is causing the problem turns out not to be the cause at all, but that doesn’t mean their observations should be dismissed. Sometimes they’ve been talked out of trusting what they know about themselves, and I never want to be the doctor who does that.

Why I still love what I do

After all these years, I’m still fascinated by the puzzle of the bodies we inhabit, including the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, causal and etheric bodies. The same laboratory result can have very different significance in two different people because the person is not simply a collection of biomarkers. There is a history there, a physiology, a personality, genetics, habits, stresses, strengths, weaknesses and usually a few things that don’t fit neatly into any particular box. That’s the part I enjoy figuring out.

I love the moment when scattered symptoms that didn’t seem to have much to do with each other begin to line up into a map we can follow, and I love experiencing someone begin to understand their own body differently. There is something enormously satisfying about finally finding the thread that makes a confusing story make sense, especially when someone has been looking for that thread for a very long time.
More than three decades later, I’m still asking why, and I hope I never stop.

Media, Teaching & Thought Leadership

Over the years, I’ve shared my insights and approaches through public speaking, teaching, and writing. Highlights include: