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🫀 Referred Pain and Visceral-Somatic Convergence

Explore why a heart attack can feel like left arm pain, why gallbladder disease hurts the right shoulder, and why appendicitis pain migrates across the abdomen. This simulation reveals how visceral and somatic sensory fibers converge on shared spinal neurons, tricking the brain into mislocalizing organ pain to distant skin regions.

Medicine & Biophysics3DModerate60 FPS

The simulation visually demonstrates viscero-somatic convergence by showing visceral afferent fibers from a selected organ and somatic afferent fibers from a body-surface dermatome both synapsing onto the same dorsal horn projection neuron, then tracing how the ambiguous signal ascends to the brain and gets interpreted as skin-based pain.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Select an organ, such as the heart, gallbladder, kidney, or appendix, to see its visceral afferent pathway highlighted alongside the somatic dermatome it converges with in the spinal cord. Adjust the intensity of visceral signaling to observe how stronger organ input can overcome the brain's default somatic interpretation, and toggle a stage slider on the appendicitis model to watch pain migrate from periumbilical to right lower quadrant as parietal peritoneal irritation begins.

💡 Did You Know?

Did you know that referred shoulder-tip pain from diaphragmatic irritation, sometimes from internal bleeding after trauma, is called Kehr's sign, and that recognizing it can reveal a life-threatening abdominal emergency even when the abdomen itself feels unremarkable on examination?

⚙ Under the hood

referred painneurophysiologydorsal hornvisceral painclinical diagnosisdermatomesemergency medicinespinal cord

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install