Angelina Jolie struggles to get accurate medical advice for her adopted children

Angelina Jolie has struggled to get accurate medical advice for her children because they are "of different backgrounds".

The 46-year-old is mother to adopted children Maddox, 19, Pax, 17, and Zahara, 16, and shares biological kids Shiloh, 15, and 12-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne with her ex-husband Brad Pitt.

During a conversation with medical student Malone Mukwende, who's determined to teach how conditions can present in non-white patients, for Time magazine, the actress admitted that having children of different backgrounds posed a significant problem when they all suffered the same rash.

"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," she said.

She went on to reveal that Zahara recently underwent surgery.

"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'," she shared.

Malone is seeking to bridge the gap of medical knowledge when it comes to how conditions present on people with darker skin, and he admitted 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."