Other than slipping and falling on you back and exclaiming, that's going to hurt, predicting back pain is not all that easy. Unless your doctor is also an establish psychic they probably can look at certain indications to consider the possibility that at some point you may suffer some pain in your back, but chances are not good that they are precise in predicting back pain. Many studies have been done in patients with and without acute and chronic back pain, but once a baseline was established their relation to other patients with similar baseline produced questionable prognostic abilities.

There is a lot of questions about the ability of those looking at spinal alignment, along with type of work and the type of education, among other factors being used in predicting back pain. In addition to having no definitive method of predicting back pain, there was also nothing that indicated what type of preventative therapy would offer the best possibility of eliminating the potential problems.

While some believe that looking at certain physical characteristics can be helpful at predicting back pain, other variables also need to be considered. Things such as age, quality of life and a person's work status can also play a role in their future development of back problems.

Individual Pain Threshold Often Overlooked In Studies

Different people exhibit a different level of tolerance to pain an while one person may be debilitated by pain, to another the same type of pain may be a minor inconvenience. Not only is predicting back pain still an unknown, the type of treatment they may respond to ending the pain is also unknown. Additionally, there are so many different causes of back pain that predicting which cause will strike which person is a near impossibility.

There are certain indications that can predicting back pain when a person is suffering from known medical problems or deformities. Persons with scoliosis for example, are most likely to suffer from back pain but the cause is known and can be identified. To some, predicting back pain is like looking at a person's current medical history and attempting to predict what internal illnesses that may contract in the future.

Since back pain is the second most common cause of pain and missing work, behind the common cold, many researchers are attempting to find ways of predicting back pain to stave off the problems before they strike. However, they acknowledge the large number of individual variables is making it extremely difficult.