Cold/heat therapy as a diagnostic tool

I suffer from both muscular and nerve pain.  It can be hard to tell the difference between the two, especially when the pain is constant. I use different types of cold/heat treatments and thought it was interesting to note that my nerve pain doesn’t like the heat (sometimes causing inflammation), while my muscular pain doesn’t like the cold (sometimes causing muscle spasms). And it seems to me that you could use cold and heat as a diagnostic tool — in a general way — to determine what kind of pain you suffer from.