What is chest wall pain?

  Chest wall pain can occur occasionally in normal people and is associated with various unobtrusive stimuli to sensory nerve fibers, which soon disappear on their own. The chest wall structure contains tissues such as skin, subcutaneous tissue, muscles, ribs, intercostal nerves, and pleura. In case of women it also contains breast, fatty tissue, breast ducts, etc. Any lesion in these tissues themselves may cause pain in the chest wall. It is also important to consider radiating pain or involvement pain caused by lesions in some surrounding tissues and organs.  Chest wall pain can occur when there is damage or inflammation of these soft tissues on the chest wall, fracture of the ribs, or inflammation of the intercostal nerves. In addition, lesions in the surrounding organs and tissues, such as involvement pain due to liver and gallbladder diseases, pain near the back ribs due to kidney stones; lesions in the spine, such as spinal tuberculosis, cancer bone metastases, etc., which compress the spinal nerve roots and cause radiating pain in the area innervated by the nerve; and angina pectoris, myocardial infarction, etc., which cause severe dying sensation and crushing pain in the anterior chest area, mostly radiating to the front of the chest and back of the left shoulder All of them may have pain.  To sum up, the pain occurring in the chest wall should not only consider the soft tissue injury or rib fracture or pleural rupture, causing pneumothorax, nerve inflammation, etc., but also exclude the lesions of surrounding organs, such as liver, gallbladder, pancreas, spleen, kidney, heart, spine, etc.