Personalized medicine: Somatosensory phenotyping in musculoskeletal pain conditions.

Somatosensory phenotyping has the potential to support personalized medicine. However, current measures do not seem to meet the criteria for being strong prognostic or predictive biomarkers, most of them are too demanding to find large acceptance in clinical settings, and their clinical usefulness has not been proven. The value of somatosensory phenotyping can be more realistically determined by re-orienting research to the development of simplified testing protocols, applicable to large-scale clinical practice, and tested for clinical usefulness in randomized controlled trials.