Many patients in palliative care today don´t get adequate pain relief. A contributing cause of this is that they experience such fear of the analgesics in use that they choose either to completely avoid pain management or to have it partially. The purpose of this review was to identify the most common patient related barriers to pharmacologic pain relief in palliative care and to investigate how these barriers affect the patient´s choice to go through pain treatment. The results showed that the most frequent barriers were a fear that the pain indicates that the illness has become worse, a fear of addiction, tolerance, secondary effects, morphine and injections together with a stoic or fatalistic belief. Furthermore the fear of distracting the physician was a barrier together with the wish to be a "good" patient who doesn´t complain about pain. The factors which determined the patients´will to undergo pain treatment were the number of barriers and what kind of barriers. Another thing that matters was the nurses´treatment of the patient when he was in need of pain relief.