We have wasps around our farm and a fair bit of traffic, I was seriously seriously concerned about someone getting stung and going into anaphylactic shock. I looked into getting some Epipens. They are over 100 bucks a pen, and they don't have a long shelf life.
Turns out a more economical solution is Benadryl. Cheaper, you can smash it up, pour it in water and force it down someones throat if they can't drink.
Oh, yeah, the cost issue with EpiPens is a huge barrier. Getting a doctor to prescribe you one when you don't have a documented life-threatening allergy is another.
As far as I can tell, there's no fundamental reason for either of these issues. Epinephrine doesn't seem to be particularly expensive to produce, so my guess is that the auto-injectors are expensive simply because of the small scale of the market.
As for doctor reluctance, I don't know what's going on there. Our doctor said he didn't want to give us a prescription because he "didn't want us to use it instead of calling an ambulance". Ridiculous. An ambulance would easily take 10 minutes to reach us. Without oxygen, that's enough time for irreversible brain damage. (I'm also iffy on the wisdom of taking someone whose immune system you've just suppressed into a breeding ground for drug-resistant bacteria, but I digress).
Which brings me to one last thing: you cannot rely on benadryl as a solution in cases of anaphylaxis. For one thing, the onset orally is a minimum of 15 minutes. That's time you simply do not have if someone's airway has closed.
Worse, there isn't really good evidence that benadryl is effective at treating the symptoms of anaphylaxis in the first place. It is commonly used as an adjunct to epinephrine. But this seems to be on a "hey, it can't hurt" basis, given the lack of evidence.
For my part, $200/year (you should have two, in case the first is insufficient) is well worth it.
