I second this. Medicine is a great career, and there are many many options to choose from. Private practice, teaching, research, non-govermental agencies (doctors without borders, WHO, etc), government (CDC, state public health departments). Work schedules are also more flexible now- hospitalist work (full-time is generally 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off), clinic work (m-f, some pay extra if willing to cover a weekend on-call, or even the solo-practitioner (always on).
Re: memorization. Well, yes, you have to learn things. But after medical school, there is far more pattern recognition, setting priorities, working with multiple disciplines, and weighing different probablities. The book "how doctors think" by Jerome Groopman may help you get an idea of the issues you deal with in day-to-day practice, or any of Atul Gawande's books.
Re: pay. No physician goes hungry. Currently, procedures are much more heavily re-imbursed than thinking (I can have an hour-long discussion with a patient to convince him to take life-saving HIV medications, and then choose from among 30 potentially toxic meds (needing to interpret a resistance genotype to do so), and at the end of the visit quick freeze a few warts off: the 1 minute of freezing will bring in more than the hour of thinking. So, if money is important, do vasectomies, cataract removals, knee replacements; basically any routine procedure that is usually done on healthy people (avoid the sick ones- they have complications).
With almost any specialty (except pediatrics, sadly) you will make at least 125-150k after residency. In some, much more. In residency, pay is about 50k/year. In year 2 and 3, presuming you are competent enough to pass step 3 of the USMLE exam, you can moonlight in urgent cares, hospitals, etc, and more than double that. During my 2nd and 3rd years of residency, and my fellowship (another 3 years after residency) I did three overnight shifts a month, which more than doubled my salary.
Outside interests:
No trouble maintaining running, social life, marriage. Resident duty hour restrictions put into place in 2003 or so have made the extremely long hours a thing of the past, and the council for graduate medical education is planning on further restricting them. My intern year was the only unrestricted year I had- maxed out at 100 hours. After that, the cap was 80, which only happened on harder rotations (5/year or so). Future cap likely to be 60. Currently, I put in 50 hours or so a week, but could do 40 (as long as I see my patients and justify my research time with publications, my time is my own).
I have absolutely no regrets. Those telling you that Obamacare is going to destroy medicine are are coming from a position that any decrease in their salary is being "destroyed". And they have a point- the pay of prceduralists will likely go down. Perhaps those making 500,000 will only make 300,000. Boo hoo. Still among the wealthiest 1% of Americans. They'll survive.