Not the Hardest Thing We've Done | Salmaan Kamal

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Dr. Salmaan Kamal is an internal medicine physician and addiction specialist at the VA Medical Center in West Los Angeles, where he cares for veterans experiencing homelessness. At every major crossroads — leaving Alabama for Princeton, returning home for medical school, turning down an Ivy League fellowship — he chose proximity to need and to family over prestige. In this conversation, we trace that pattern and what it taught him about trusting his own instincts. We talk about what happens when his daughter was born at 23 weeks and how surviving that changed the scale of everything that followed. And we get into the daily discipline of putting the phone away at six in the evening — what that discomfort actually feels like, and what's on the other side of it. Salmaan is one of the most thoughtful people I know. This conversation is about what it costs to stay that way.

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Salmaan Kamal, MD, was raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and he attended Princeton University with a focus on global health and health policy. After graduation, Kamal worked as a policy associate at the National Coalition on Health Care in Washington, D.C., where he advocated for policy reform that improved value in the U.S. health care system.

Kamal attended medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where he led the student-run free clinic for the uninsured. He completed internal medicine residency and chief residency at UAB Hospital, where he completed the Society of General Internal Medicine's Leadership in Health Policy Program. After residency, he completed the UCLA National Clinician Scholars Program, a health services research and public health fellowship. His work focuses on improving care for people with a history of homelessness, addiction, and criminal legal system involvement. He currently cares for people experiencing homelessness at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center.

For more on some of Salmaan's work: https://youtu.be/VG3R6XNC1Qk?si=_MNIzk2xDRqBMB4J and https://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/our-work/health-equity-challenge/finalists/2024/salmaan-kamal

In this episode:

- Growing up in Tuscaloosa with two physician parents — and the family intervention that sent him to Princeton instead of Alabama
- The moment in the operating room when he realized he was the only one looking at the clock
- A cold email, a twenty-minute walk across campus, and finding his people
- What it means to choose a safety-net hospital over a bigger name — again and again
- His daughter's birth at 23 weeks, and how "this is not the hardest thing we've done" became a family compass
- Putting the phone away at six — what boredom actually feels like, and why productivity was the permission structure to start
- The question he's sitting with now: what happens when the constraint disappears and work becomes optional again
- What he'd build if he trusted himself completelyDr. Salmaan Kamal, MD, was raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and he attended Princeton University with a focus on global health and health policy.

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The Principal Uncertainty is a podcast by George Laufenberg. It's not about finding solid ground — it's about staying oriented in open water.