Angela Udongwo Is Using Hair to Address Disparities in Medical Imaging

There are so many aspects of health that disproportionately affect the Black community, and yet less than six percent of US doctors are Black — a deficit that only further harms public health. Many of the Black folks who work in healthcare have dedicated their careers to combating inequities. That’s why, this Black History Month, PS is crowning our Black Health Heroes: physicians, sexologists, doulas, and more who are advocating for the Black community in their respective fields. Meet them all here. Angela Udongwo calls her journey to becoming a Black health hero “serendipity.” If you’ve yet to learn about her work, Udongwo, who is a third-year medical student at Temple University, has been examining how braids, twists, and locs (referred to as BTLs) present in medical imaging. “We’re looking at x-rays for the most part, but also magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) and computed tomography scans (CTs),” Udongwo tells POPSUGAR. After the scans are taken, Udongwo also looks at how physicians interact with them. “We examine how often they see images with BTLs, how comfortable they are with how the hair presents, as well as how knowledgeable they are with this phenomenon of how hair can present in this imaging,”...