Cutaneous and reffered pain examples?

Nursing Students General Students

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Can anyone give me me examples? I know what somatic and visceral pain is. Somatic is pain in structures like your ankle and visceral is pain in organs.

Specializes in Critical Care, Education.

Referred pain is very interesting.... arising from physiologic 'connections' that may have been established in the fetal stage of development. This is when pain from an organ/structure is actually felt in a completely different body part. For instance, one of the early indicators of an aortic aneurysm is pain between the shoulder blades. Inferior MI's frequently 'feel' like indigestion. If you want to read up on this... you should also take a look at reflexology.

Cutaneous? You can figure that one out.... what does that word mean? (Latin root -- cutus=skin). It means pain at the skin level. Usually due to a skin lesion/injury that damages those superficial nerves.

Thanks. This helped. My resource I was studying wasn't clear enough. I just didn't want to mix the two on the test!

Specializes in Trauma, Teaching.

cutaneous pain: from the skin, involving subcutaneous tissue; sharp, burning, superficial pain

visceral pain: from the large organs; injury, distention, contraction, ischemia; appendicitis, kidney/gall stones

referred pain: originates in one place, felt in another, from shared spinal nerves: may be somatic or visceral

somatic pain: blood vessels, joints, muscles, tendons, bones; ischemia, pressure, trauma

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