It may depend quite a bit on the pill. As an adult I can easily dry swallow things like ibuprofen. But I’m not sure about something like oral steroids.
I was prescribed them as a kid due to a particularly bad poison ivy reaction. I couldn’t swallow pills at the time, so after running through all the tricks to teach someone, we ended up grinding them up and sticking them in ice cream. It was something like 15 years before I could eat cookies and cream again without tasting steroids. Grinding them definitely exacerbated the problem, but I’m not sure how I’d fare if prescribed the same pills again.
Shortening the longer leg is much less invasive and probably preferred, but the discrepancy has to be caught very early. You need years of measurements to predict exactly how long each leg will be and when. If you have those, there’s a pretty small window when the long leg is exactly the right length to tell it to stop growing.