Gastritis Pain Location
Where is the gastritis pain location? There is a lot of confusion out there regarding where you feel pain if you have gastritis. Having the information given in this article is important. It allows you to approach your doctor for an early diagnosis and treatment. Untreated gastritis increases your chances of developing stomach cancer. So, where do you feel pain from gastritis?
Where do you feel pain from gastritis?
The following are the most common gastritis pain locations;
In the upper-center or upper-left of the abdomen
The stomach is situated on the left side of your upper abdomen, below the breast area. This area tends to be the one where people who have gastritis mostly feel pain. Inflammation can occur on any part of the stomach lining.
That means gastritis pain can be distributed in any of the area from the esophageal sphincter to the beginning of the small intestines. Should you get an endoscopy as part of the diagnosis process, this is where your doctor will focus on.
Is an endoscopy painful? Learn more
On the chest
Gastritis can also present itself as chest pains. These pains are usually on the left side of the chest, though you may also feel them on the right side.
Chest pains as a symptom of gastritis can be confusing. It may be hard to reconcile the pain that you are feeling with the fact that the cause is actually a problem in your stomach.
However, the thing to understand is that sits right underneath the chest. So, it’s not uncommon for gastritis pain to radiate into the chest area. That is one of the reasons why you will will probably get a ECC and a chest x-ray as part of the process of being diagnosed.
When you present yourself at your doctors’ with your symptoms, one of the first things that they will want to do is to eliminate your heart as the cause of your problems. In my case, chest pains were the major symptoms of gastritis.
I even had arguments with one of my doctors, during which I was adamant that there was nothing wrong with my stomach. That’s because I had never presented some of the classic symptoms of gastritis, such as bloating. I had also never had problems with stomach acids.
On the back around the left shoulder bone
This is another common gastritis pain location. Again, the location of pain on the back of the body can be confusing to a lot of people. You will never think what you are feeling has anything to do with your stomach.
In my case, I couldn’t even move my left shoulder at the height of the pain. I would walk around with my hand firmly planted to the side of my body. Any attempt to lift even a small object would result in debilitating pain on the back.
On the shoulder and neck
Though not so common, gastritis may also present itself as pain on the left shoulder and on the left side of the neck. The thing to note is that there is a lot of referred pain with gastritis. You may not always feel it in the area where you think it should be, making a diagnosis rather difficult.
What does the pain feel like?
Those are the areas where you are likely to feel gastritis pain. But what does the pain feel like. This is something with which I am very familiar. Pain from gastritis can feel like a dull ache that comes and goes. It can also become constant.
You may wish to check my article on how to relieve gastritis pain fast. The good news is that there are several things that you can do to alleviate your suffering.
In some instances, you may feel a burning sensation as part of the pain from the disease. Again, this pain may come and go. In my case, I sometimes went years without feeling any pain. Then suddenly, I would start having chest pains again.
What happens when you swallow food
To further our understanding of gastritis pain locations, we will look at what happens when you swallow food. The food that we eat travels to the stomach through the esophagus. For adults, the esophagus is between 10 and 13 inches long. This is the first place where your doctor will look for trouble during an endoscopy.
If you have been producing too many acids, your may have what is referred to as Esophagitis. That’s inflammation of the lining within the esophagus. At the end of the esophagus, there is what is referred to as the esophageal sphincter. This is the connection between the stomach and the esophagus.
The esophageal sphincter only opens when you swallow food, to let it into your stomach. The stomach is where gastritis occurs. So, locating it on the human form is important in fostering our understanding of the gastritis pain location.
Summary
In this article, we looked at gastritis pain locations. The thing to note is that no two people are going to feel the same thing. However, in general, you will feel gastritis pain in your mid upper abdomen, in the left side of your abdomen, in your chest, on your back and, sometimes, on the left side of your neck.
Knowing these locations is important as far as coming up with a proper diagnosis is concerned. Some of the pain from gastritis may present themselves in areas where you would never think they had anything to do with your abdomen.
This can become a problem in that you can spend months or years beating about the bush without getting proper treatment. A major challenge is that you an end up having referred pain, where pain from an ulcer or from an inflamed stomach lining manifests far from the troubled area.
I have already noted that I sometimes got shoulder pains. You may also get headaches that are triggered by gastritis. Once a proper diagnosis has been made, you will be well on your way to recover. Gastritis can be painful. However, it can be managed and treated fairly well.