The present study aimed to verify what is part of the decision-making process of the professional nurse who works in Palliative Care (PC), in relation to the conduct to be followed by him when providing care to patients who have a disease with no possibility of cure. . We start from the assumption that fear of death and "magical thinking" are some of the elements present in this decision-making process. In general, the literature indicates that humanity has always been afraid of what it did not know and perhaps this is the reason for fearing death so much. Magical thinking, on the other hand, is an expression used to describe the belief that certain thoughts would lead not only to the fulfillment of desires, but also to the prevention of problematic or unpleasant events. Regarding PC, we can say that in Brazil, the insertion of PC philosophy in Brazilian academic circles is reduced. It is noticed that sometimes professional nurses are not absolutely sure that the care they provide is really the most appropriate. This made us think that maybe this professional performs his work and makes professional decisions, based on rules and protocols, but also on his own beliefs and values, making use of the magical thinking described by Piaget. This author states that it would be possible that in the normal and civilized adult, traces of magical attitudes, verified in children, remain. According to his findings, these attitudes would also be the result of confusions between the self and the external world, which sometimes reappear momentarily in the phenomena of imitation or emotion. Exploratory field research was carried out in the city of São Paulo/SP. For the treatment of qualitative data, we used Bardin's content analysis and for the quantitative data, the treatment was done through descriptive statistics. Participated in the study, 11 nurses who provide services in institutions and/or services specialized in PC, whether outpatient and/or home care. The data collected did not indicate the emergence of magical thinking, according to the hypothesis raised, however, they indicated that most of the participants do not have training in Palliative Care and make predominant use of technical standards and protocols, probably because they do not feel safe in relation to the principles of care. CP The almost exclusive use of norms and protocols seemed to make it impossible for professionals to reflect more deeply and access magical thinking as a supporting factor in their professional decision-making.