The egg-and-chicken situation in postoperative enhanced recovery programmes

Nowadays, enhanced recovery programmes (ERPs) are well established and used in the daily practice for different surgeries in many specialties. They involve pre-, intra-, and postoperative measures or elements. Among the postoperative measures, early mobilization and early oral intake are commonly cited. Accordingly, these two postoperative elements are included in all published ERPs and were shown to be the most used and reported interventions...