In this talk we discuss at hand of two examples the crucial role played by self consistency in hadron physics. The first example concerns the quark-mass dependence of the baryon octet and decuplet masses. It is shown that within a self consistent one-loop approach based on the chiral Lagrangian the 'mysterious' quark-mass dependence of the $\Xi$ mass predicted by the MILC collaboration may be recovered in terms of a discontinuous chiral extrapolation. This is a consequence of self consistency imposed on the partial summation, i.e. the masses used in the loop functions are identical to those obtained from the baryon self energies. In the second example we discuss recent studies on the properties of D mesons in cold nuclear matter as they are predicted by coupled-channel dynamics. Here a self consistent many-body approach reveals the close interlink of the properties of D meson and open-charm baryon resonances in nuclear matter. The relevance of exotic baryon resonances for the spectral distortion of the $D_s^\pm$ in nuclear matter is pointed out.