I am doing a phd in biomed. I don't have a lot of perspective but here's what I got. You can do research either way. PhDs and MDs write grants together, and in our case it seems they just put whoever will be most beneficial as PI (depending on who's going to pony up the dough, does it look better to have a surgeon or a researcher as PI...). Since I'm considering the switch to MD, I am probably biased towards just doing MD. PhDs take a long time, and the stipends are fine if you have no previous debt and no one else to support but I could see it being pretty nuts if that were not the case.
It might depend on what kind of research you want to do.
Others can chime in here, but here's what the MD side seems to be to me. If you are the MDs that we do research with for example, you are involved in some of the ideas, you tell us on the research side no that idea won't work bc doctors won't use that, or hey, we doctors need this can you make something to bring us that information. You and researchers settle on a general idea, write the grant, get the monies. Then as the MD you are further involved as the way the researchers get their data from clinical cases.
The researchers on the other hand have the knowledge base to actually build the system, to make the new scaffolding for tissue, to make a new bioreactor, to build the prosthesis. We don't always know what is useful, which is where the MD comes in, but we are the people who build it. And troubleshoot it. We know the physical attributes of the device, what forces it will withstand, the velocity profiles of blood going around it, what it breaks down into in the body as it degrades, the cell thickness we can grow on this polymer with these size pores with this type of media and so on. We go (eventually, not all labs are so closely working with clinicians obviously) to the clinic/OR and we get data with the MDs, and it confirms or refutes some things we thought about our system, we edit, and so on.
So if you want your responsibility to be the patient in the clinic, and you want to be PART of a group that is trying new ideas, and you want to be part of those new brainstorming sessions and help move stuff forward, do MD. If you really want the research, the system that is being developed in a lab, to be your baby, and you want to know everything about it and bring it to term in some way, then a PhD is more along your lines. Both sides want to help people, but at the end of the day, who is your baby, the patient or the device/system/method you're building. That seems to be part of the difference for me, and is part of the reason I am thinking of starting all over and switching
If the research making-the-project-mine-all-mine sounds like something you really want to do for a while, to really see that side of things, of course you do have to consider the time. PhDs take a while, and if you really want to take more ownership (your own ideas, write the grant, get the money, do the work) then a post doc would probably be in order. Then when you turn back to MD, uh well we all know how ridiculously long that road is.
Oh, and if by research you think you'd be excited about using what technology is already out there and testing one versus the other, this technique versus the other for hip replacement surgery in terms of time, blood loss, etc, this endoscope versus this one, this treatment plan vs this one, then that's another set of MD research which would (I assume) be taking place without PhD collaboration, so it's kind of a different animal and of course in those types of cases you could call the project and the patient care portion both your own.
