How can a tiny pimple can hurt a whole shoulder?
In: Biology
This is called “referred pain”. It occurs due to our nervous system being so complex and interconnected that a painful stimulus can cause other parts of the body to hurt too. This is why heart attacks can cause pain in multiple places like the chest, shoulders, arm, and jaw.
Edit: depending on the extent of the pain, it could just be due to inflammation. Blood vessels dilate in areas where certain issues are happening (e.g. infection, trauma, etc.) And this influx of blood causes leakage of fluid outside your blood vessels. This creates pressure in the area, which stimulates nerves and is painful.
Med student here.
When you hurt your skin, the blood will run more to the wound, and the blood vessels become more leaky, so more liquid and cells get out to help healing the wound. The increased amount of blood and all that collection of liquid and cells in the tissue creates the red colour and bump we usually see, plus pressure. This pressure on the local nerves gives the feeling of pain. Depending on how big the pimple is, and how sensitive is the area, you can feel more or less pain. Once the wound heals, the liquid is reabsorbed, and the pain disappears.
Applying ice helps the pain, because the cold temperature will stop the blood from running more to the area and reduce the process.
There is also the rare risk of developing an infection. The skin is the first and very effective barrier against the little bad guys that try to attack us. When you pop a pimple, you break that barrier, and open a door to the vulnerable part of the body. The pimple might be harmless, but the wound it creates can allow the bad guys to enter and an infection to develop.
Edit: tried to simplify more.
Yoyo has the right of it.
It’s an unfortunate side effect of how nerves work.
First, pimples and papercuts are the worst. your pain nerves branch out to cover the surface of the skin, so injuries that don’t cut all the way through hurt extra extra.
And pimples, as abcesses putting pressure on everything around, them hurt their own special way, as the skin stretches to bursting. On top of that, in places where your skin is flat, the inflammation and irritation easily spreads to cover a larger area. Fun times all around.
Then it’s as Yoyo said. Deferred or disassociated pain. Due to the strangeness and complexity of nerves, pain can often move to appear in other places, like heart attacks, especially in women who tend to disassociate pain more and not recognize heart attacks. Heartburn and gas often cause chest pain or breathing distress. There are dozens of examples if you think about it.
Then there is the third and final reason. Tension. People don’t realize this, but when you have a pain past a joint, you unconsciously abuse that joint.
For example.. an injury in one foot can cause your OTHER knee, hip and SHOULDERS to hurt as you slightly favor the injury. Being aware your shoulder hurts makes you inadvertently hold your shoulder oddly to make it hurt less from touching things. This tiiiiiny change is going to make your neck, shoulder and arm start aching, which will blend with the pain you already have.
it’s quite amazing really.. pimples..
As good as the other answers about referred pain are, I don’t feel like they quite explain it like you’re 5.
Basically, you have a highway with 8 lanes there’s a Ferrari in lane 7 and a VW beetle in lane 8. Imagine the highway merges lane 1 with 2, 3 with 4 and so on. The highway now has 4 lanes. And this happens again, so the highway has 2 lanes. Now there’s a toll booth on each lane of the highway. Does the toll booth in lane 2 know whether the beetle and the Ferrari were in different lanes? As far as the toll booth is aware, they’ve always been in the same lane and there’s not much way to know where they came from.
The body’s nerves work similarly where the closer you get to the brain, the more the nerves merge together and pain from one spot can feel like it covers a larger area than it does, or even from a completely different spot.
Your pores are small. They get filled with anything, and they stretch.Think of a balloon you blew up for the first time, theres alot of resistance, let the air out blow it up again, and it’s not as hard. Some pores get use to it, most commonly on the face this will occure. The tighter the pore the more pain you will feel. If it hurts its an unstreched out pore.
Is that the same reason I can stick my finger in my belly button and have a pain shoot down my leg?
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