Ferney Bernal Buitrago is a specialist general practitioner (the Australian equivalent of a board-certified family physician) practicing in regional New South Wales, Australia. Originally from Cali, Colombia, he graduated in medicine from Universidad del Valle and has practiced in Australia since 2011, working across general practice, intensive care, and emergency medicine. He was awarded Fellowship of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners in 2026.
His debut book, Non-Human Humanity: What Working with AI Taught Me About Being Human (Propensio Animi Press, August 2026), grew out of a year of close work with an AI that invented citations and agreed with everything he said, and out of what those errors revealed about our own.
He served as a site investigator on the AbSeS study, published in Intensive Care Medicine in 2019. He writes about thinking, uncertainty, and the machines we now think alongside at his Substack, and shares updates on LinkedIn and Instagram.
The colleagues who made me a safer doctor were the ones who pushed back. The registrars who asked, “Are you sure?” The nurses who stood in the doorway until I looked at the chart again. The pharmacists who called about a dose I had already convinced myself was fine. Medicine, done well, is organized disagreement: a system of people licensed to tell one another, kindly and in time, that they …
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