Knowing the area of involvement helps us to understand a persons symptoms like pain.
Unfortunately, to date too little direct research has been carried out on pain drawings.
With the advent of computing power we can now better investigate variation and validity in pain drawings.
Previously paper illustrations were all that were used to document the location of pain.
Medical textbooks, written by authority figures, rely on drawings accumulated from hospital or clinic practice.
In some cases the location of pain is pathognomonic (characteristic) of a disease.
Consider illustrations of pain associated with passing kidney stones, acute appendicitis, or a heart attack (figures 1-2).
Such illustrations imply that sufferers themselves would draw such patterns. We seldom question the variability associated with pain location, though one would expect it.
It is assumed that such drawings of pain have been the subject of formal high quality research. This is not so.
For example the referred pain patterns from muscles and so-called triggerpoints are commonly used to diagnose triggerpoint syndromes.
This author (Bryner) has not been able to find any original research for these illustrations.
Another example is pain location in women suffering heart attacks is significantly different to the classic illustration (figure 3).
It turns out that that the original research into pain location in heart attacks was carried out mainly in men whose patterrns and distribution is different than in women.
In regard to indigestion, the common conception is that this pain is "epigastric" (figure 4).
However, in studying the report of indigestion amongst 1100 persons seeking chiropractic care showed a wide spread of pain these subjects called "indigestion".
(Bryner 1998) (Fig.5).
Take home message: consider pain illustrations to be the opinion of an authority unless identified to the contrary.