I'm all for open mindedness and maintaining a rational amount of uncertainty, but it seems to me bojjhanga parittas and most (if not all) of the parittas fall under superstition rather than Dhamma that would meet the criteria of AN 4.180 four great references.
http://lucid24.org/an/an04/an04-v18/index.html#s180
That the modern sutta collection contains suttas such as SN 46 bojjhanga's SN 46.14-16, does not meet AN 4.180 standard, the same way we can't take what the Bible says is God's word because God said it was in the Bible.
Instead, it should lead us to conclude that these 3 suttas are not the words of the Buddha:
SN 46.14 Gilāna 1 : sick: probably a corrupt sutta. It's not in accordance with the Dharma to chant 7 magic words and expect miraculous healing powers to occur.
SN 46.15 Gilāna 2 : sick: probably a corrupt sutta. It's not in accordance with the Dharma to chant 7 magic words and expect miraculous healing powers to occur.
SN 46.16 Gilāna 3 : sick: probably a corrupt sutta. It's not in accordance with the Dharma to chant 7 magic words and expect miraculous healing powers to occur.
If the Buddha did indeed teach such supertitious parittas with inherent magical healing powers, then why did he ever need to use medicine to deal with illness, or use animitta samadhi to suppress body pain from Devadatta injuring his foot, or any of the great Arahants doing similar things? Why need medicine at all or like Anuruddha teaches in Anuruddha samyutta, use 4sp satipatthana to bear great phyical pain from serious illness, when they can just chant 7 magical words that magically heal illnessness and pain?
How would Milinda explain this?
Did Buddha and Arahants have karmic merit just on certain occasions to use the parittas (as in SN 46), and then suddenly lose merit and not be able to use the paritta on other far more numerous occasions when they could have benefitted from it as well?
It just doesn't make any sense. We have to reject this whole paritta thing as superstition.
The actual miraculous healings people experienced throughout time, most of the time devas (guardian angels) are doing the heavy lifting. Otherwise, how can we explain medically miraculous events occurring with other religions, and even with atheists with no religious intermediary healer?
The common denominator we find in the vast majority of the cases with miraculous healing, with subjects of different religions and atheists, is that they are
1) great people with lots of positive karma accumulated over many lifetimes, and attract of circle of friends that include devas and guardian angels in abundance.
2) or people with very mixed or even net bad karma, but have some karmic debt to collect from a guardian angel who heals, and after their miraculous healing they start doing lots of great positive karmic actions to show appreciation and pay it forward. The devas foresaw that this would happen, and thus lent a hand in transforming their character.