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 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

And doctors cost money we didn’t have. So unless something was really wrong, you didn’t go.

You 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 did not 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, and somehow this body of mine kept recovering.

Long before I knew anything about natural medicine, 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 I can't remember going to a doctor for anything. That didn't mean everything was actually ideal.

I had severe constipation. (Didn't know that at the time, again, thought it was normal) Heavy bleeding with my periods. Insomnia. Low self-esteem. I was always just overweight enough to feel bigger than my girlfriends, although what I did not know then was that I had PCOS and unusually high testosterone that influenced the way my body developed. And I was a dork, didn't fit in because I was a "cowgirl" in a high school that had become urban overnight. (And I wasn't really called a "cowgirl", but the real high school name for the rodeo club isn't fit for public consumption here).

I simply accepted all of it as normal.

And some of it was almost comically explainable in hindsight.

My mother made wonderful freshly brewed loose-leaf iced tea. I would drink 3 or 4 big glasses of highly caffeinated tea throughout the evening.

Then I couldn’t sleep.

Nobody connected those dots. Certainly not me. I just thought I was someone who couldn't fall asleep.

There is something about that realization that has stayed with me professionally.

Sometimes there is a reason that needs further attention to prevent future worsening health.

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 nothing. At my follow-up, I told him that the prescription hadn’t done anything.

It was only then that he explained to me that 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 even without training, something about that did not make sense to me.

What exactly were we fixing?

I think I probably laughed or scoffed. Maybe both. I said no thank you, and I didn’t take it again.

I didn’t know that question would follow me for the rest of my career.

What are we actually fixing?

Then medicine became painfully personal.

Not long afterward, my mother developed leukemia, then lymphoma.

Watching someone you love become seriously ill changes the way you see healthcare. From my viewpoint as her daughter, I saw enormous attention being paid to the disease and to treating what was happening to her.

What I did not see, at least from where I stood, was much attention being paid to making the person herself healthier.

That distinction affected me deeply.

She died within three years of her diagnosis.

I do not 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.

Those questions became very real for me.

Meanwhile, I was bored to tears.

My first career was as a software analyst. On paper, and in my bank account, a perfectly respectable career. In reality, I was bored out of my mind.

Then I got promoted into management and discovered something important about myself:

I absolutely HATED managing people.

Particularly when management meant telling someone else to perform a task that I knew perfectly well I would never want to do myself.

I was working for a huge, faceless corporation. Every morning I drove an hour through traffic so I could arrive at 8:00. Sometimes I arrived to find absolutely nothing meaningful that needed to be done.

But I had to be there at 8:00.

Why?

Because 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.

Becoming the kind of doctor I would trust

When I chose this path, I made a promise to myself:

I wanted to become the kind of doctor I would trust with my own health.

That still guides me. It means:

And it means I listen.

Really listen.

Because after more than 35 years in practice, I have learned that patients often know something is wrong long before anyone has given them the language to explain it.

Sometimes they have even been talked out of trusting what they know about themselves.

I never want to be the doctor who does that.

Science, intuition, and the things that are harder to measure

My education has never stopped. Thousands of hours of continuing education have taken me through functional medicine, clinical nutrition, hormone health, gut health, acupuncture, herbs, homeopathy, chiropractic, physiology, emerging laboratory testing, and many other areas.

But my understanding of healing has also been shaped by the less measurable side of being human.

Through my own healing and decades of working closely with people, I have learned to trust both what can be measured and what can be deeply felt.

I have strong intuitive pattern-recognition skills. Sometimes I know that something in a case deserves attention before I can fully explain why.

Occasionally a connection occurs to me during meditation. There have even been times when I have awakened from a dream with a thought about a patient or a diagnostic clue that I had not consciously connected before.

I know how that sounds.

Thirty-five years ago I might have been more hesitant to say it out loud. Today I am comfortable with it. Intuition does not replace science for me. It sits beside it.

An intuitive thought gives me another place to look, another question to ask, another possibility to investigate.

Most of the time, you will never even know it happened. You will simply notice that I asked an oddly specific question.

My approach and values

Every patient’s story is unique, and so is every care plan.

My practice is built on respect, empathy, careful listening, and a dogged curiosity on my part to find real answers.

I see both the art and the science of healing.

It is understanding that the same laboratory result may mean something entirely different in two different people.

And it is remembering that the person sitting in front of me is not a collection of biomarkers.

This is why I practice the way I do. 

Not because I believe one particular system of medicine has all the answers.

I don’t.

I practice this way because I have spent most of my life asking questions, testing assumptions, looking for connections, and trying to understand what the body is actually doing before deciding what it needs from me.

More than three decades later, I am still fascinated by it.

I still love the moment when the scattered symptoms suddenly line up into a map we can follow. I still love watching someone begin to understand her own body differently.

And I am still asking why.

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: