ans, because "at the moment our ability to tell where back pain is coming from is rubbish".
"This holds back research, and our progress in treating back pain has been minimal, with 95% of people with back pain having no known cause," he says.
"Trying to find treatments for chest pain wouldn't make any progress either if heart attacks, pleurisy, pericarditis, pneumonia, rib fractures, lung cancer and pneumothorax were all grouped together as 'non-specific chest pain'. I don't believe we will make serious progress with finding new treatments for back pain until we know what's causing it in each person."
Dr. Sheldrick says the inability of doctors to determine the cause of back pain leads to a "one size fits all approach to medicine, in which 95% of people get the same treatment".
"Even without finding new treatments, being able to classify people based on the cause of their back pain opens up new avenues for personalised medicine," he says.
"Some people might be better candidates for one exercise regimen, others might be best served by a different exercise regime, while a third group might be best served by surgery."
Dr. Sheldrick says that using the more accurate decay variance technique to diagnose back pain using MRI is probably about three years away from being available to doctors and the general public for clinical use.