The following is a dialogue I had with a chiropractic client recently regarding the purpose of subluxation. 
I hope you enjoy it and it gives you food for thought.
This is the question my client Dan asked. “Coach can you help me understand the purpose and meaning of a subluxation. It appears to be one of the most confusing concepts in chiropractic today.”
Great question and in fact it is the only “unanswerable” question in chiropractic philosophy because it is basically an offshoot of one of the three unanswerable questions in philosophy (Why does God exist?)
Therefore there is no “right” answer but I am happy to share with you my opinion.
In my world view, our Innate intelligence is constantly monitoring our world via reading, interpreting and adapting to our internal and external environment. When it encounters an energetic input that is greater than its ability to adapt it “stores” that energy so that it does not miss the opportunity to incorporate that energy into it’s energetic essence once it has the skills, tools or energetic capability to “understand” all aspects of that “energetic encounter” in the future. This is what I call a subluxation.
After all our trip here as spiritual (energetic) beings is about evolving, learning, experiencing etc. (In other words it is about incorporating and expanding as many different energetic experiences as possible into our essence so that we can move to another “quanta” of energy and expand the possibilities for our lives and our essence and get closer to the source of the energy).
Therefore I look at a subluxation as a primary tool in the evolution of the species called humankind. Without it we would slow down the entire evolutionary capacity of humanity and decrease the likelihood of achieving the next “form” with which humanity will evolve into.
The next obvious question then is “why didn’t God (the Creative Intelligence or Essence) create humankind so that Innate could just adapt to every stress?” The answer for me comes down to some of the fundamental principles in our Universe, the principles of free will, choice and contrast.
Principle of Contrast
The principle of contrast tells us that without contrast it would be harder for us to appreciate and truly “learn” things. We appreciate warm because we know cold. We appreciate joy because we know despair. We can “feel” love because we know hate, loneliness and fear. We know health because we have been touched by disease and pain.
Principles of Choice and Free Will
The principles of choice and free will give us the opportunity to “choose” which path in life we will take. It allows us to “choose” whether we jump off the 100 foot cliff or not (we are not lemmings). Getting subluxated or having “limitations of matter” (Stephenson’s text does a great job of this) allows us to choose a different path the next time we are choosing to jump or not off the 100 foot cliff.
Without the ability to choose we would either be “robots” that just did the bidding of the Creator as it was all pre-programmed to do or we would annihilate the species quickly because we couldn’t learn to make different choices and therefore defeat the purpose of the Creative Intelligence putting the effort into creating the species in the first place. Remember survival of the species is the prime directive in chiropractic.
Asking the question “why does God allow us to have choice?” is another likely question. The answer that I am the most comfortable with at present is because God wanted to experience all aspects of his/her self and by giving us choice we fulfill that wanting.
These are pretty heavy constructs Dan and they are much more suited to conversation than to the constraints of 2-dimensional e-mail. However I have tried to do justice in this format and yet be as brief and concise as possible.
If you are compelled, I recommend you clicking the image below to strengthen your WHY in chiropractic.