Angelina Jolie is calling out a huge issue in the medical field has impacted her very own children.
The 46-year-old recently interviewed medical student, Malone Mukwende, who is set on teaching other want-to-be doctors how conditions and diseases can be present in non-white patients.
Mukwende, 21, began his project after learning that, “almost all the images and data used in its teaching were based on studies of white patients,” which can lead to “misdiagnosis, suffering and even death.”
In response to Mukwende’s work, which has evolved into a handbook, Mind the Gap, as well as an online platform called Hutano, Jolie says that she’s witnessed the issue with her own kids.
Jolie and her ex, Brad Pitt, share Maddox, 19, Pax, 17, Zahara, 16, Shiloh, 15, and 12-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne.
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“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 color,” Jolie explains. “But whenever I looked at medical charts, the reference point was always white skin.”
Jolie also experienced something similar when daughter Zahara, who is Black, had surgery last year.
“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,'” Jolie says. Mukwende add that experiences like Jolie details are “the kind of thing I started to notice very early on.”
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“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,” he says. “However, as 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.”
In other recent news, Pitt and Jolie have finally reached a custody decision. This past month, Brad was awarded joint custody of the kids he shares with his ex but Angelina is not pleased with the outcome.
And while Angelina has been fighting for a while — she says it is due to the way that Brad has treated their six children. In addition, she has accused Brad of domestic violence and getting physically and verbally abusive with their children.
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