Why is Pain Referred?
With certain muscles, the reality of referred pain can often be demonstrated by simply pressing on a trigger point that is bad enough to reproduce part of its referred pain pattern. It’s a little harder to explain why pain is referred at all. Research on pain referral is difficult because the mechanisms of the human nervous system are so unimaginably small. The tiny electrochemical impulses in the nerves can be detected and measured to some extent, but not with accuracy or great discrimination. In addition, there are ethical limits on how far you can go in pain experiments, whether with animals or humans. Nevertheless, scientists have made a number of suppositions about how pain can be displaced from its cause. The easiest theory to accept regarding referred pain is that the signals simply get mixed in your neurological wiring. Sensory inputs from several sources are known to converge into single neurons (nerve cells) at the spinal level, where they are integrated and modified before b
