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Referred pain, also called reflective pain, [1] is pain perceived at a location other than the site of the painful stimulus.An example is the case of angina pectoris brought on by a myocardial infarction (heart attack), where pain is often felt in the left side of neck, left shoulder, and back rather than in the thorax (chest), the site of the injury.
Kehr's sign is a classic example of referred pain: irritation of the diaphragm is signaled by the phrenic nerve as pain in the area above the collarbone. This is because the supraclavicular nerves have the same cervical nerves origin as the phrenic nerve, C3, C4, and C5. [citation needed]
The misdiagnosis of pain is the most important issue taken up by Travell and Simons. Referred pain from trigger points mimics the symptoms of a very long list of common maladies, but physicians, in weighing all the possible causes for a given condition, rarely consider a myofascial source.
Typical locations for referred pain are arms (often inner left arm), shoulders, and neck into the jaw. Angina is typically precipitated by exertion or emotional stress. It is exacerbated by having a full stomach and by cold temperatures. Pain may be accompanied by breathlessness, sweating, and nausea in some cases.
In people who have arthritis, referred knee pain can often delay the diagnosis of a hip problem. An extreme but straightforward example of the referred pain concept is in the case of heart attacks ...
Some referred pain due to visceral sensations refer to dermatomes that send fibers to the same level of spinal cord. A dermatome is an area of skin supplied by sensory neurons that arise from a spinal nerve ganglion. Symptoms that follow a dermatome (e.g. like pain or a rash) may indicate a pathology that involves the related nerve root ...
Pain arising from structures supplied by the phrenic nerve is often "referred" to other somatic regions served by spinal nerves C3-C5. For example, a subphrenic abscess beneath the right diaphragm might cause a patient to feel pain in the right shoulder. Irritation of the phrenic nerve (or the tissues it supplies) leads to the hiccup reflex.
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