How is referred pain generated?
Many of the nerve endings converge and share the same nerve cell-pool in the spinal cord and as the signal travels up the spinal cord to the brain the signal lands on the same area as pain signals from another part of the body. The awareness of pain is felt in the thalamus (a deeper centre of the brain) but the awareness of where the pain is coming from, the location of pain, is determined by the sensory cortex on the surface of the brain. The quality of the pain with referred pain varies for different structures and also varies depending on the level of inflammation. Many textbooks on the matter like to present things as black or white. For example, nerve pain tends to be sharp in nature but muscle pain tends to be a deep ache sometimes burning. But in clinical practice you realise that the pain can be quite variable from one person to the next. Some muscles can give a sensation of tingling in the area of referred pain, but tingling is traditionally considered to be associated with ne
