[jb1991]

This is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say that medicine had a light workload, especially compared with other academics. Every person I’ve ever known who went into medicine was extraordinarily overworked for many many many years.

[rwanda]

OP here. This is country dependent. From most I've heard medicine is one of the or the most difficult program to study in most countries workload wise. In the country I live it's quite different. From what I've gathered, the average seems to be 40h/week including lectures with only P/F. This might be due to medicine being a 6 year program as opposed to 4 years such as in the US. I'd put the difficulty to be quite comparable to a good CS or engineering program. I think the dropout-rate is ~10% which is very low.

[derbOac]

Having my feet in both worlds, I can say medicine is definitely not a light workload. However, I do think some of that is self-inflicted and unnecessary (in terms of medical organizations doing unnecessary things for the sake of hubris and/or impression management and/or exploitation and/or rent seeking). I also think the costs of academics in terms of work demands aren't generally acknowledged in public discussions, so there's kind of a "default relative assumption" about the two that's a little distorted. Medicine also varies a lot by location, so what's involved in different places is really different (this isn't to say some places are subpar, just that I think training philosophies etc can be really different).

Finally, in a broad sense, the OP is probably right that pursuing academics will be more difficult. In a hours per week sense, maybe maybe not (it's probably about the same), but academics is so completely broken that it's going to be a lot less straightforward and fraught. Europe, from what I get from my colleagues, is much more sane in both areas, but similar costs and benefits probably are involved.

I agree with others that the OP is probably burned out. But I think that's the nature of his problem. I'm more concerned about the fact he's saying that he doesn't have the interest for the math. That might be a function of that program, or might be a clue he's not interested.

Some random thoughts:

1. I might reconsider the goal of going to the US. There's plenty of great places in Europe, and (speaking as an American), academics are screwed up in the US. It's a bubble if there ever was one.

2. The OP might reach out to people in medicine and see if there are projects in medicine they could help out with, in terms of research etc. Even if it's remote I imagine there might be things they could do? It might help figure things out and/or open doors.