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The closest you will get to predicting a back pain is when you see someone fall on their back, and you saying "That is going to hurt". Maybe your doctor is a known psychic medium, but most doctors are not. It could be that they could give you an estimation, looking at some indications, that at some point int he future you may feel some pain in you back, but those predictions will not be accurate or certain. There have been some studies with patients that had acute and chronic pain in their back and patients that hadn't. But in relation to other patients the prognostic abilities of the baseline could be questioned.

Some are looking at things like spinal alignment, type of work and even education of the patient when trying to predict back pain which of course is very questionable. Aside from not having a way to predict a back pain there is also no way of indicating the type of therapy to stop the problem from occurring.

The factors that have a lot of potential to help in predicting are specific physical characteristics but those are not the only factors that play a big role. Age, way of living, work are just a few of the other factors that should be considered as well.

Don't forget the pain threshold

Everyone feels pain in a different way, one person could be debilitated by it and the next person would think the pain is nothing more then some inconvenience. Predicting the back pain a person will get is almost impossible while there are so many causes. Predicting the type of treatment a person will need is almost as difficult.

Knowing a persons medical problems could make you think that it is possible to predict if and when he or she will get a back pain, like people with scoliosis, who we know are most likely going to get back pain. When exactly, that is the hard part. You may think that looking at someone's medical history is all that it takes to predict they will have a back pain in the future, that's not the same as predicting when they will get the back pain.

All researchers agree that it is very difficult to predict a back pain because of the many individual factors that are involved. They would, however, like to because of the simple fact that having a back pain is the number 2 when it comes to causes of pain why people stay home and don't go to work. So they would love to find a way to stay ahead of the game but up to now they are not successful.

Will they ever be able to predict with reasonable accuracy when a person will have a back pain? Probably not, and even if it would be possible then there should also be a way to get rid of the pain. What good would it do to know that you will start having a pain at a certain point in time and not being able to prevent it from hurting.