with the 3ds format you should be able to get med models into blender. there was a bug with blender's 3ds importer though and i don't know if it got fixed in the recent version. maybe you will have to convert the 3ds to obj with wings3d first. from blender you can export mdl7 then after you are done.

learning blender is worth it! after some practice it's possible to work much faster in blender than in med.