ABSTRACT
There are many clinical features of visceral pain but the one that makes it more distinctive is the frequent referral of the painful sensation to areas of the body away from the diseased organ. This is what Henry Head called ‘‘referred pain,’’ a painful sensation reported in a region of the body remote from the originating lesion (1). Referred pain is a useful diagnostic tool in the clinic because the patterns of referral produced by a lesion in a given internal organ are constant across subjects (2). It is also a phenomenon of considerable neurobiological interest, which implies that the brain can attribute a painful sensation to the wrong location and generate a mismatch between the real and the perceived sites of injury.
