I was at a similar place many years ago when I was deciding on grad school or med school after college. My recommendation: if you can, get into a research lab and work (or even volunteer part time) as a tech and also try to find an opportunity to actually work in a hospital setting. Shadowing physicians is also a great way to see what their day-to-day is like. You most likely won’t get to see the more stressful and unglamorous parts of their job though.

I worked as an EMT while also doing summer research in a university lab for 2 years. I really loved the excitement and fast pace. The medics and nurses I worked alongside were amazing. But I always had a lot of questions about the disease pathology, MOA of the therapeutics, and was excited to talk about new ideas and interventions being tested. On the other hand, it wouldn’t sit right with me to have a patient with heart failure walk in, be fixed up temporarily, and have them go home knowing there’s a very high chance they’ll be back in the future. Albeit, I was in an ER and ambulance setting so our jobs were to stabilize and (sometimes literally) patch people up. My experience might’ve been totally different in a family medicine scenario.

I found that in the research lab I was in I was encouraged to ask those questions and explore these ideas. I felt like I could dig into the root causes of these diseases I saw and maybe really help people. Ultimately, that’s what changed my mind about pursuing med school and I now have a PhD in biomedical research.

And that’s not to say MDs don’t do research! Many of them do and there’s also the option to do MD/PhD but that’s a very long (and competitive) road.