Well, as a PhD holder doing the pre-med thing these days, I'll address a few of your comments, if I may...
OK, I'm reading between the lines, you are a slave at some big headed PhD's beck and call with barely enough time to study or write papers.
Also, does everyone assume everyone's 20 years old without a family.
If I do any research, I want to do clinical research (I'm looking at doing diabetes research in an urban clinic.) I do volunteer work in the hospital. I really don't see myself being someone's lab rat.
I have a feeling this prof. doesn't have a lot of broad knowledge and is simply applying her own experience to other's prospects.
You're the bottom rung of the ladder in a lab, if you do research there. We've all been there, and it's not that you're getting treated as a dogsbody (if someone is rude to you, that's quite inappropriate), but you have a limited skillset, and so the only things that you are qualified to do are basic things like running gels/simple programming, etc. A good supervisor will give you simple projects and slowly expand your skills and responsibilities.
You can't just jump in, decide on a project and run with it, without help. Right now, you don't have research skills, your practical skills are not as advanced as your supervisor's, and you have no sense of the field in which you are working. I'm not trying to be harsh, but that's just the way things are. We can let you run around and waste resources for a summer/semester/year, doing something obvious that has been done a hundred times and isn't in any way inventive, or we can teach you.
Research also takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. You won't get papers and presentations from a few weeks of work - so you'll have to be inconvenienced and put in the hours, if you want something out of the experience. In most cases, if you can do something in a month, as a more experienced person who knows how things work, I ought to be able to do it in a day or two. If it was worthy of publication and took two days of work, I would have done it already...
Clinical research might be ideal for you... But you'll still lack the skills and appreciation for the subject area that your supervisor will have. You will probably start by doing data entry or surveying patients. Just remember that it will take time to gain skills and responsibility.
Your professor probably doesn't know what is required for medical school, but has a good idea about grad school requirements. You don't need to have research experience for an MD program, but quite a lot of people do, and it does help. Research teaches you to read critically and think critically - the MCAT verbal reasoning section attempts to assess this, to a limited extent. As a doctor, you'll be reading a lot of papers, articles, journals and books, quite literally until the day you retire, so these are valuable skills. These are things that you don't have right now, and that's why you can't be a researcher with a lot of responsibilities yet, but we can teach you, and you and your patients will benefit from it in the years to come.
Alternate approaches, everything from OMM to nutrition to herbs especially when antibiotics are not recommended. Example, herbal treatment of Otis Media when doctors are being told not to prescribe antibiotics. Poor patient is in pain and you aren't supposed to cure him or her.
Diet and exercise for all the many and various chronic diseases. Stress reduction techniques. Incorporate many modalities (sp) to approach the patient as a whole person rather the sum of the parts only focusing on the part that's giving someone grief.
http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/articles/article.aspx?articleId=273§ionId=11
Sometimes anti-biotics are not recommended for good reason - Otitis media often returns periodically, and while it is painful and annoying, it usually resolves itself in around three days. As a researcher, you would have read some of the studies that indicate that anti-biotics seem not to make a difference in the outcomes or recovery rates in most cases. As a responsible physician, you should appreciate the issues with over-prescription of anti-biotics in the population as a whole and the risks involved with prescribing in this manner. The patient may be in pain, but they can't be cured - it will resolve of its own accord... As the guidelines suggest, give them ibuprofen/etc. and antihistamines/decongestants to relieve symptoms, and they'll be better in a few days. If not, investigate more vigorous responses.
Doctors don't try and leave their patients in pain - that's the last thing that they want; but they do value making sure that they do the best thing for those patients.
Diet and exercise are beneficial to many patients, and accepted parts of many treatment plans, where research indicates...
As for the rest, it depends what type of doctor you want to be. It seems to me that at the moment, you are on the verge of favouring giving treatment to patients without any proven benefit to their wellbeing. Homeopathic pills, aromatherapy and all of that. The nature of many aspects of medicine, is that intervention often has side-effects, as does action or inaction, depending on the circumstances. As a physician, you have a responsibility to 'First: Do no harm". You should be offering treatment that in your judgement has a reasonable probability of improving their health, because if it doesn't, you are potentially going to make them worse off.
Many holistic treatments lack the level of investigation that conventional treatments require to prove their validity. Homeopathic therapy is a particularly good example of this. Drug companies spend millions of dollars testing drugs to see if they have dangerous side effects, before patients can be given them (even then, sometimes unusual effects occur rarely). I'm not saying that perhaps holistic therapies don't make a difference, but until we have research:
a) We don't have great proof that they work
b) We don't know if they will do more harm than good
c) We don't know if they work better than the conventional solution
But seriously... If a simple, minimally processed herb was able to eradicate conditions X, Y and Z, we'd be using it by the bucketload. That's exactly what happened with Aspirin, after all. But no herbs out there seem to be magically anti-biotic (and trust me... we need more types of anti-biotics to treat resistant strains of nasties!), nor do they cure the common cold, nor do they enlarge your breasts or 'manhood' as the spam proclaims. If they did, everyone would be talking about it.
The reason that research skills are prized for clinical training, is that they help you choose effective and safe care for your patients. If you want to offer treatments to your patients without proof that they are safe and work properly, you don't need to become a doctor. There are plenty of people in the world who sell and advise on unproven techniques, all without qualifications that take more than half a decade and $150,000 of debt.
If you want to be serious about taking care of your patients and making responsible and informed decisions, however, go to medical school and nuture your critical thinking skills for all they are worth, including through research experience, even if you never do research in your eventual workplace.
Perhaps also consider Osteopathic careers paths; they have a subtly different focus to Allopathic education, and if you want to follow a scientific path but treat in a different manner, that might suit you.
