How to Use Low-Dose Atropine to Slow Myopic Progression in Kids (2016)
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Eyes are plastic. Glasses are a bit like braces for teeth; they direct the shape of the eye as well as re-shaping its input. Few people try to reshape their eyes to improve uncorrected vision, but it can work.
The side effects of drugging children long term seem scarier to me than any possible side effect of glasses they can take off at will. Maybe I'm just an old fart. After all, they said that giving 30% of our kids ADHD drugs would ruin society, and ... oh.
As the doc says, the risk isn't needing thick glasses, it's all of the other problems that come with high myopia (an eyeball that is slightly too long). Two big ones ones are retina detachment and lattice degeneration -- basically, the forces acting on a misshapen eye are slightly higher and over time, that extra tugging adds up.
If the only negative byproduct of high myopia was needing thicker glasses, I would agree with you. It's not even in the top 10 negatives.
As an example, retina detachment risk is 6x higher in people with high myopia than those with low or moderate myopia: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6688422/
> Retinal detachment. The risk of developing a retinal detachment is five or six times greater in people with high myopia compared to those with low myopia. People with high myopia have longer eyes (axial elongation), which means that the retina is more stretched and therefore prone to peripheral retinal tears. In addition, myopic eyes have a degenerate vitreous that is more likely to collapse and separate from the retina, also increasing the risk of retinal tears. High myopia can also cause central retinal degenerative changes such as posterior staphyloma, lacquer cracks and chorioretinal atrophy; these have been used to grade myopic maculopathy.
Which makes me go "ummm" and wonder about correlation.
I'll just restate that I'm generally leery of long term drug treatments when there's other options; there's certainly reasons to consider them too.
Your reference says High Myopia is "A person who needs ≤ −5 D of correction has a visual acuity that is far worse than the threshold for blindness (–3/6 in the better eye)." which is certainly worth considering some rather severe side effects to improve.