This paper addresses ethical questions concerning animal-assisted therapy (zootherapy). While it has been documented for centuries in several cultures and is resistant to urban and technological developments, it combines multiple moral and vulnerable agents, constituting a dilemma whose fair and consensual solution calls for new perspectives, like environmental bioethics. Through analyses of scientific texts, the arguments and values intrinsic to decisions about how and when to use animals as medical resources are systematized. Using bioethics as a method, reflections are offered about the potential solutions dependent on the multidimensional communication between the players from the three pillars of sustainability - environment, society, and economy - involved in this global ethical question, focusing on conservation and sustainable production.

The conscious use of medicines require the addition of ethical, emotional, social, and environmental dimensions to the rational drug use, such as the understanding of the health/disease mechanism. Our objective was to characterize the idea of medication by different social groups, through a quantitative exploratory cross-sectional study. The participation of 266 respondents allowed us to characterize the relation between self-care and cultural and environmental parameters, as well as the identification of vulnerabilities that were linked to the access to information and education, which was mainly observed in rural respondents and in those who have only had access to basic education. Most of the interviewees had a global view of health, connecting it to life habits and attesting the hypothesis that self-care should be conceived as an ethical principle; however, the specificities of representations evidenced a relation between self-perception and self-management of health. The analysis supported the confluence between bioethics and global health in the promotion of ethical and educational discussions in order to enable citizens to deal consciously with medicines. In this way, it is encouraged self-care and care for nature as means of preventing diseases and allowing the promotion of health and life quality, both to humans and to the ecosystem, at local level, but with global repercussions, benefiting this and future generations.

A inserção dos medicamentos nas práticas de consumo consciente representa um potencial de aliada na promoção da saúde global; assim, objetivou-se mapear a aplicação da terminologia uso consciente de medicamentos. Realizou-se uma revisão documental integrativa quantitativa com a categorização de 124 textos científicos e 400 conteúdos digitais. Os resultados atestaram incompatibilidade de sinonímia com a terminologia uso racional de medicamentos, uma vez que esta não contempla as dimensões econômicas, sociais, psicológicas, ambientais, de comunicação e de valores éticos na decisão de como usufruir dos medicamentos. A implementação e consolidação da terminologia deve subsidiar políticas educacionais e de comunicação e, consequentemente, a instrumentalização para a prática do autocuidado e cuidado com o outro e com o ambiente, ao ressignificar o mecanismo saúde/doença e compreender os processos envolvidos na pesquisa, produção, distribuição e descarte de medicamentos.