why is pain not always in the exact location of an injury?
In:
2 scenarios I can think of:
If you get an injury, the place where you get visibly hurt is often not the only place your body suffered damage. For instance, last night I slipped and fell on some ice, and I bumped my elbow. Today, my shoulder and upper arm hurt, even though I didn’t hit them. But the force of the impact probably traveled up my arm from my elbow, causing small amounts of damage elsewhere.
The other is that pain travels through nerves and is interpreted by the brain. Nerves mostly come from your spinal cord, and the nerves from your spinal cord split apart and come together a lot. If the nerves sensing pain for 2 places in your body come from the same level of your spinal cord, sometimes your body interprets the signal strangely. This is why you get arm pain from a heart attack – the autonomic nerves controlling your heart come from about the same level as the pain-sensing nerves in your heart, so when your brain gets a signal from your heart saying “bad stuff happening!” it decides to interpret that as arm pain because it doesn’t know how to make your heart hurt.
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