Most people that want to go into medicine probably don't realize the amount of "routine" they will see until they're too far into training, and they've already decided that research isn't for them. Also, many people that wish to go into medicine have some sort of vision about what they see themselves doing ("I'm going to be a heart surgeon!"; I'm going to be a Dermatologist!") They may realize that they'll see boring things, but at that point, with not a ton of experience, the thought is often manifested as, "I'll deal with the boring stuff, because I'll also get to do major, life-changing things!" And they're not necessarily wrong. But realize that everybody has a different price, you don't only do UTIs/mole checks.
Additionally, what do you think researchers do? Discover cancer in a day? Work short hours? Get tons of money? Get a job immediately at the NIH? You write grants, manage a lab, think of experiments not just from a science standpoint, but from an economic, publishable, get-you-somewhere way. You wait hours for results that come back inconclusive. You screw up experiments and sit in a chair thinking about what the hell you're missing in your design. People beat you to it, you start over, you spend years waiting for something huge, and in the meantime, focus on the step-by-step. Yes, there's variation, but by and large, please realize that research is also extremely routine in terms of process, and perhaps even more frustrating in that you often have no precedents to tell you whether the weird results you got were outliers, or probably significant. Thus, you choose which way to go, and after a lot of time spent, may realize that you chose to go in the wrong direction.
Researchers do take their work home with them. If they badly need funding, or have just wasted money on a process that actually doesn't do anything, or if they're losing people in the lab, or if they wish the manuscript was higher impact, or awake in the middle of the night wondering if the extremely expensive dyes they got were accidentally left in the light for 12 hours, they're going to experience stress. It doesn't magically stop at the door because the job is different. There are different things that cause stress, and sure, objectively, killing somebody vs losing product are not the same, but as a researcher who's never killed anybody, what baseline do you have, from personal experience, to say that your own woes don't skyrocket your BP or cause depression and severe anxiety?
Plus, "routine" is different for many people. After a while, you'd be surprised at how nice "routine" is, after you've dealt with a number of doozies, and/or just don't have the energy/crazy passion that you had as a doe-eyed premedical student.
Prestige means different things to different people. Physicians who catch something routine that presented in unorthodox ways can feel pretty damn good about themselves, perhaps more than a guy who discovered a new gene in drosophila that discusses their wings. Similarly, if that research has ways to translate that into practical use, they can also feel damn good, more than a physician who spent the entire day ordering A1Cs and signing insurance forms.
What your work means to you is more important than the purely general, objective action that others may judge.
