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It’s the pure potential of her young patients that rewards Dr. Stephanie Robinett as she helps babies, kids and teenagers through treatment for neurological disorders.

As the only full-time pediatric neurologist in the Pine Belt area, Robinett enjoys the chance both to aid her patients in forming healthy habits early on and to preside over their typically swift recoveries.

“Kids just tend to bounce back from something where an adult would not fare nearly as well,” she said. “Their brains are just so plastic — they can make tremendous recoveries.”

Robinett, 31, has been seeing neurological patients from newborns to 21-year-olds since joining Wesley Medical Center last fall. She came to Hattiesburg primarily to be closer to family, along with her husband, general surgeon Lee Turner of Southern Surgical Associates.

Robinett is a native of New Orleans, but most of her immediate and extended family has now relocated to Hattiesburg. It’s here that she also received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Mississippi.

She went on to study at the University of Mississippi School of Medicine, and completed a pediatric residency at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C. She joined Turner in Seattle, where she completed a pediatric neurology residency at the University of Washington.

The couple returned to Hattiesburg in September 2007.

As one of four neurologists in practice as the Southern Neuroscience Center, Robinett treats patients in four primary areas: epilepsy and first-time seizures, headaches, developmental delays, and ticks.

For a practice that’s based in medical therapy, recent years have held a marked improvement in the anti-epileptic drugs available on the market, she said. Previously, physicians’ only option had been between prescribing a drug whose side effects would dull a child’s thinking and slow progress in school, she said.

“You only had a limited repertoire of medications,” she said. “But now, there’s a whole host of new anti-epileptic drugs that have significantly better side-effect profiles and less cognitive impact than some of the older drugs.”

Robinett is looking forward to new medications slated for release in the next year or so, although it takes longer for new drugs to filter down for use in children. Typically, she said, that’s after the drugs have proven effective in adults, and after the pediatric community as a whole accepts them and sets the proper dosage for smaller patients.

Also on the horizon, Robinett is looking forward to the arrival of fetal MRI technology, which she used in the academic environment during her residency.

“I think it’ll significantly change my practice as it filters down to the community level,” she said. “Whereas my practice now extends to newborns, I’ll also be doing some prenatal consultations in the years ahead.”

As local obstetricians and radiologists become comfortable with the technology, she said, it will allow for prenatal diagnoses of brain malformation. The goal is helping families prepare for a newborn’s likelihood of disability and chances for survival, she said.

Dealing with families as a whole rather than simply with individual patients is the norm for pediatric practice. But Robinett approaches each appointment as an educational session for all involved.

“You really have two or more patients in every (examining) room you walk into,” she said. “There’s a lot of anxiety with seizures and headaches — ‘Is it a tumor?’ — so you really have to be patient and explain things well.”

Much of her time with families is spent helping them understand her findings and instructing them on warning signs for which they must watch vigilantly. Keeping up with medical instructions at home is more likely among children than adult patients, she said, given that parents are seeking out treatment for them and reminding them to take their medications.

Also, as opposed to adult patients, the children and teens Robinett sees don’t come with the sort of life baggage — like years of smoking or other unhealthy habits — through which adults often have brought health troubles onto themselves.

“Children are sort of a fresh palette,” she said. “You have the chance to build some good behaviors in them.”

Robinett spends the bulk of her day in clinic appointments with her patients, and dashing back and forth to nearby Wesley Medical Center for inpatient consults, admits and rounds. She fills any gaps with the task of crafting reports from EEG results, both for local patients and those at Natchez Regional Medical Center, which sends her its EEGs to read.

Since launching her practice in September, Robinett has welcomed patients from around the Pine Belt and as far away as Jackson and the Gulf Coast.

Outside of work, she and her husband enjoy traveling — although that passion has been set on the back burner as they’ve focused on establishing their practices and caring for their 18-month-old son, Cole.

While in Seattle, they enjoyed spending time on the coasts of Oregon and Washington, with frequent visits to Victoria and Vancouver Island in Canada.



April 2008

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