Completely agree with the above comment, but I go to a very "traditional" med school in the deep South. Schools in other areas might be quite different.
I hope more people of your mindset do go to medical school! I found the first two year's curriculum to quite boring (which is not to say that I was good at it
), but I was able to cobble together some great electives that made third and fourth year more enjoyable.
Overall I've been shocked by how little training most physicians seem to have in ethics, knowledge, philosophy, sociology and law, considering how important that stuff is to our job. But people in medicine have such different personalities, I'm sure you could ask other people in my class and they would tell you that ethics class was completely pointless.
I would encourage you to pursue what you think will be most rewarding to your long-term goals! There have been times when I wished I had gone the PhD route, but ultimately I'm glad for the choice I made. Some reasons why I stuck with medicine...
1. I was already in medical school when I realized what medical school was actually like. (Oops). At that point I didn't want to throw away the time and money I'd spent and not finish.
2. I found almost every field of medicine very interesting and genuinely loved helping people with their health issues. I like being a doctor first, then a psychiatrist.
3. You can always get a PhD or more training is psychology later.
4. I wanted to be able to prescribe medicines for my own patients.
5. Job security and variety - felt like the M.D. would open up a lot of options to me (running a community mental health center, addiction treatment program, etc)
6. Medicine and medical school is a completely different, weird culture and it's neat to be apart of it. (Also frequently miserable, but I'm a fourth year atm so I'm not very miserable
) Very few people get the experience of training to be an MD. It's pretty crazy.
7. I'm sure there was a good deal of ego thrown in there.