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Inside Val Kilmer's Christian Scientist faith and how he claimed 'prayer' cured cancer before his death at 65
His death came 11 years after he was diagnosed with throat cancer , triggering a traumatic battle with the illness that he initially concealed from the public.
Throughout his health struggles, he found solace in Christian Science, a 19th century American movement that teaches that diseases are caused by the mind and that prayer works best as a cure in lieu of medicine. In a withering takedown of Christian Science, Twain wrote of its main text: 'For of all the strange and frantic and incomprehensible and uninterpretable books which the imagination of man has created, surely this one is the prize sample.' The belief system has proven consistently controversial down the decades - after Old Hollywood screen siren Jean Harlow died at 26 as a result of kidney failure in 1937, her legacy was clouded by a persistent flurry of false rumors that her Christian Scientist mother had refused to let her see a doctor.
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