One of the popular objections to Christian arguments for prophecy fulfillment is that the prophetic passages are too vague. Can Psalm 22 be dismissed that way?
How close have you come to fulfilling the psalm? How about your relatives? Or any contemporary you know of? How many people in history other than Jesus?
As I've explained elsewhere, like here, the psalm involves far more than the assaulting of the person's hands and feet referred to in verse 16. The passage comes across as a crucifixion in multiple ways and lines up well with Roman crucifixion practices specifically. The psalm implies the Jewishness of the individual (verses 1-4, 8, etc.), which rules out the large majority of people in history, refers to his being delivered (verses 22-24) from the death he was headed for (verses 15, 20-21) in some manner, and refers to widespread discussion of what happened both geographically and chronologically (verses 27-31). Those details also rule out a large percentage of people, including Jews.
If something other than crucifixion is going to be proposed to explain the passage, the alternative to crucifixion needs to be comparable or better, such as some kind of known practice and one that existed in a relevant context. If somebody is going to propose some hypothetical form of torture, execution, or other infliction of suffering that's not known to have existed, such as making up an unknown illness that has the symptoms needed to fulfill Psalm 22, that's an inferior explanation than a known practice in a relevant context, like Roman crucifixion. Or if there was some kind of torture or execution that was practiced by a culture in the past that lines up well with the kind of suffering described in Psalm 22, we'd still have to go on to ask how well that alternative to the traditional Christian view lines up with the other details involved in the psalm.
I don't know of any explanation of the suffering described in Psalm 22 that's comparable to or better than crucifixion. But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there was some other, comparable form of execution that existed at the time when Psalm 22 was composed. That other form of execution can explain the details of Psalm 22 just as well as crucifixion does. That would weaken the evidential value of the psalm for Christianity. But would it eliminate the evidential value? No. We'd then be in a situation in which somebody would have to go through one of two types of execution in order to line up with the passage. That would be a broader window of opportunity to fit through, but it would still be narrow enough that only some small fraction of one percent of individuals in history have experienced it. Making that fraction of one percent a bigger fraction doesn't change the fact that it's still extremely unusual to go through either kind of suffering, whether crucifixion or the alternative. The type of suffering involved is extremely rare, even if you spread it out over two or more subcategories of that extremely rare category of suffering. And there are other details in the psalm that narrow the range of candidates further (e.g., the Jewishness of the individual, some kind of deliverance from the death involved, and the influence across geography and time, as discussed above). In other words, finding an alternative form of suffering that aligns with the passage adequately is just one portion of what needs to be addressed.
People often refer to whether Psalm 22 anticipates crucifixion, and that's useful shorthand for summarizing the controversy as it currently stands. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the psalm doesn't have to anticipate crucifixion, or Roman crucifixion in particular, in order to provide significant evidence for Christianity. The psalm does seem to anticipate Roman crucifixion, but even if it didn't, it anticipates some kind of highly unusual suffering and some highly unusual accompanying circumstances that Jesus fulfilled and David didn't. Even if such events had happened in David's life, it would be extremely unlikely that such unusual events would also occur in Jesus' life by natural means.
It would be very unlikely upfront that David would experience a sequence of events as unusual as what's described in Psalm 22, and what we know of David's life after the fact makes it very unlikely that he experienced what the psalm describes. It would be even more unlikely that a future empire would adopt penal practices that would happen to line up so well with that psalm and would choose that form of punishment for a Jewish individual whose family claimed Davidic descent and who also lined up with other prophetic criteria outside of his control (coming before the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D., the large amount of influence Jesus had on the Gentile world after his death, etc.). Remember, as I've discussed elsewhere, Jesus' ability to provoke his enemies isn't equivalent to an ability to make them crucify him or crucify him at a particular time. We see that fact illustrated in the lives of Jesus' brother, James (stoned to death, as described by Josephus), and Paul (such as in 2 Corinthians 11, as discussed in my post just linked). Christians didn't choose the penal practices of the Roman empire. Christians didn't decide on something that would so closely align with Psalm 22. The Romans did. And Jesus (considered as a man, not God) and his followers didn't decide that he would be crucified. The Romans did. Similarly, the geographical and chronological influence anticipated in the closing verses of Psalm 22 line up well with how influential Jesus' crucifixion has been, and that influence wasn't controlled by Jesus or his earliest followers. Even when Christianity was taken to the nations as time went on, the initial Gentiles who converted (and many who later converted) made that choice.
The argument from prophecy is cumulative. It's like the strands of a fingerprint. You don't need every strand in every prophecy. A passage like Psalm 22 doesn't need to address every Messianic issue or be enough to prove Jesus' Messiahship or Christianity as a whole by itself. It can be evidentially significant as part of a cumulative case. And it is.
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