The Mayfield Method

I was in my twenties the first time I remember really questioning the way healthcare worked.

I had gone to a doctor because I was concerned about my weight. I had always been just heavy enough to feel self-conscious about it, and at the time I had no idea that I had PCOS or that there might be hormonal reasons my body was behaving differently.

The doctor gave me Synthroid. Over the next month, I took the bottle. Nothing happened that I could discern.

I went back and told him it hadn’t done anything. It was only then that he explained that I would need to take it for the rest of my life.

I remember thinking, What?

I had no medical training. I knew nothing about physiology, functional medicine, or endocrine pathways. But something about that answer bothered me.

What are we actually fixing?

I think I probably laughed or scoffed at the idea, said no thank you, and never took it again.

I didn’t know it then, but I would spend much of my professional life asking some version of that same question.

Not because every long-term treatment is wrong. Not because symptoms should be ignored. And certainly not because everything can be solved naturally.

I simply want to understand what is happening. Why did this begin? What changed? What is the body responding to?

Is the thing we are treating actually the problem, or is it the downstream effect of something else?

What happens if we follow the trail farther back?

That curiosity has shaped almost everything I do.

Because the body does tell a story. It may not tell it in a straight line. It may mumble. It may contradict itself. It may throw in a symptom that seems completely unrelated just to keep things interesting.

But there is usually a thread.

Fatigue, anxiety, hormone changes, digestive problems, sleep disruption, brain fog, inflammation, pain, mood shifts, and that vague “I just don’t feel like myself” feeling are often not as random as they first appear.

My role is to find what connects them, then choose the tools that make the most sense for the person sitting in front of me.

Not as easy as it sounds, sometimes.

And honestly, that is the part I love.

I love that moment when scattered pieces begin lining up. When something that seemed unrelated suddenly matters. When a patient tells me one little detail almost as an afterthought and the whole case shifts.

There is something deeply satisfying about finally being able to say, “Ah. Now this makes sense.”

More than functional medicine

Functional medicine has brought many valuable ideas into healthcare: looking for root causes, asking better questions, using nutrition, understanding inflammation, and paying attention to the gut, hormones, detoxification, and nervous system.

I use those tools every day. In fact, I was using many of them before the term “functional medicine” was everywhere. I was talking about the “terrain” of the gut long before everyone called it the microbiome. I was using safe, bioidentical hormone support back in the early 1990s, along with saliva, urine, neurotransmitter, digestive, and nutritional testing back when natural healthcare was still dismissed by much of the mainstream.

So yes, I’m grateful functional medicine has become more accepted.

But it is still only one lens.

It is possible to leave one healthcare box and simply move into another one.

A practitioner can become so focused on labs, biochemical pathways, medications, nutrients, and supplements that the patient once again becomes a collection of numbers and pathways instead of a whole human being.

It may be a more natural box.

But it is still a box.

(And I have never been very good at staying in boxes.)

My background is unusually broad, and that is a big part of what makes my work different. I can look at a patient through functional nutrition and evidence-based nutraceuticals, but I can also consider homeopathic remedies, chiropractic kinetic chains, muscle testing, acupuncture meridians, ancient Ayurvedic and Chinese herbal formulas, body/mind/spirit patterns, and the deeper questions that come from spiritual seeking and personal growth.

Not all at once. Not in a “let’s throw the whole kitchen sink at you and see what happens” kind of way.

The art is discerning which lens matters for this person, at this moment.

The clue is often in the thing that doesn’t fit

One of the biggest mistakes in healthcare is assuming the loudest symptom is always the most important one.

Sometimes it is. Often it is not.

A lab result may be abnormal, but not central. A symptom may seem small, but turn out to be the clue that changes the whole case. A patient may mention something casually at the end of a visit — almost as an afterthought — and suddenly the picture shifts.

That is why I listen closely.

I want to know what started first. What changed. What keeps repeating. What makes things better or worse. What happened before the symptoms began. What you have already tried. What helped a little. What made things worse. What nobody seemed interested in. What you almost didn’t mention because you thought it sounded too weird.

For the record, “too weird” is often clinically useful.

The body is not a machine with one broken part. It is a living system constantly adapting to stress, injury, hormones, inflammation, emotions, environment, infections, toxins, nutrition, sleep, and whatever else life has been throwing at you.