Reading Ernie Hudson talk this week about his 1998 prostate cancer and his 2011 rectal cancer recoveries hit me a particular way. Black men are taught not to say either of those words in public, and saying them out loud is a screening message in itself. Every reader who saw a headline this week and thought "I should call my doctor" got something from that disclosure that no public-health PSA has been able to deliver.
Three pieces went live on blackhealth.org since the last note. Each is built around a question a reader can ask a real provider, with the evidence on the same page.
1. The Black maternal-health hub
Black women die from pregnancy-related causes at 50.3 per 100,000 live births. White women die at 14.5. That gap widened, not narrowed, between 2022 and 2023 (Hoyert 2024, NCHS Health E-Stat 100). The cornerstone hub we published Friday pulls together what the peer-reviewed evidence says about closing that gap and the seven supporting articles that go deeper on each piece.
Headline finding readers tell us they did not know: in the Ickovics 2007 CenteringPregnancy randomized trial, the African-American subgroup specifically saw preterm birth drop from 15.8% to 10.0%. That is roughly a 37% reduction, P=0.02, in a peer-reviewed RCT with 80% Black participants. Group prenatal care is not a niche idea. It is a tested mechanism with stronger results in our community than in the trial population overall.
2. The Hudson three-cancer screening evidence for Black men
The piece pairs Hudson's two public disclosures with the screening evidence for the three cancers his story implicates. Prostate: the Prostate Cancer Foundation 2024 NEJM Evidence guideline (Garraway et al., PMID 38815168) recommends Black men start the PSA conversation at age 40-45 with family history, age 45 otherwise, and projects roughly a 30% mortality reduction for Black men who follow the earlier-start protocol. Colorectal: USPSTF 2021 Grade B recommendation (Davidson et al., PMID 34003218) lowered the universal start to 45. Oropharyngeal: Villalona 2022 (Annals of Family Medicine, PMID 36696662) showed Black male mean survival of 69.7 months versus 99.6 months for white peers, an aHR of 1.78 for cancer-specific mortality. The piece names what to ask a doctor for each one.
3. How to find a Black OB-GYN
The piece does not pretend the race-concordance evidence for newborn outcomes is settled. Greenwood 2020 (PNAS, PMID 32817561) reported a halving of the Black-newborn mortality gap with concordant care. Borjas 2024 (PNAS, PMID 39284046) re-ran the same Florida dataset and could not replicate the result. We say so out loud. What does replicate is the Ickovics CenteringPregnancy mechanism plus the cultural-adaptation bundle (De Ornelas 2025 JMWH, PMID 40396192, Beloved Birth Black Centering, Alameda County). The piece names three directories that surface Black OB-GYNs and Black midwives, plus three first-session questions tied directly to that evidence: group prenatal care availability, culturally-adapted-perinatal-care training, doula integration.
Resources we trust
Our own directory is in build-out. Until the next batch of verified clinicians goes live, three external resources have the receipts to be useful this week:
- National Birth Equity Collaborative (birthequity.org), Joia Crear-Perry's organization, for the policy and clinical-training side
- Therapy for Black Girls (therapyforblackgirls.com), Joy Harden Bradford's directory and audience-anchored network for Black women seeking therapists
- Black Mental Health Alliance (blackmentalhealth.com) for a clinician finder when Therapy for Black Girls is the wrong fit by audience
We list these because their verification trails check out under our own intake rubric, not because they sponsor anything here.
A real question, not a generic one
What would you ask your prenatal provider on the first visit if you knew the evidence behind every question? Write to hello@blackhealth.org. We read every note, and if the patterns we see are stronger than what our reporting already covers, that becomes the next OB-GYN piece.
Until next week,
The Black Health Editorial team