Angelina Jolie has struggled to get accurate medical advice for her children because they are "of different backgrounds".
Angelina Jolie
The 46-year-old actress - who has Maddox, 19, Pax, 17, Zahara, 16, Shiloh, 15, and 12-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne with her ex-husband Brad Pitt - admits that having children of different backgrounds posed a significant problem when they all suffered the same rash.
Angelina - who adopted three of her children internationally - explained: "I have children from different backgrounds, and I know when there was a rash that everybody got, it looked drastically different depending on their skin colour. But whenever I looked at medical charts, the reference point was always white skin."
Angelina expressed her concern during a conversation with medical student Malone Mukwende for Time magazine.
The Hollywood star spoke to Malone in her capacity as the magazine's contributing editor, and Angelina also revealed that Zahara recently underwent surgery.
She shared: "Recently my daughter Zahara, whom I adopted from Ethiopia, had surgery, and afterward a nurse told me to call them if her skin 'turned pink'."
Malone is seeking to bridge the gap of medical knowledge when it comes to people of colour, and he admitted that it's a "very problematic" issue.
He told the actress: "That’s the kind of thing I started to notice very early on. Almost the entirety of medicine is taught in that way.
"There’s a language and a culture that exists in the medical profession, because it’s been done for so many years and because we are still doing it so many years later it doesn’t seem like it’s a problem.
"However, like you’ve just illustrated, that’s a very problematic statement for some groups of the population because it’s just not going to happen in that way and if you’re unaware you probably won’t call the doctor."
Tagged in Angelina Jolie Brad Pitt