Yes, overall I would agree that it is the best option if you can
afford it.
However, sometimes I think it is over-prescribed. A friend of mine was
missing just two teeth, molars towards the rear, and he could easily
have gotten a bridge there but instead he went for implants. He is
very pleased with them, but if it were me, I would choose a bridge by
an experienced dentist.

In general (though admittedly I have not HAD a bridge, but I know
people who do), I don't think an implant is all that much better than
a bridge. I still get food stuck in my implant bridge, just like my
wife gets in her regular bridge, and the regular bridge is much
cheaper and easier to install and can be easily re-made and
re-installed if necessary.

I think implants are good if you need quite a few teeth replaced and
if you do not need a sinus lift or bone graft or that type of thing,
which in my opinion (I'm not a dentist!) makes the procedure more
risky and certainly more painful.

The one thing I am telling people is that implants aren't always as
great a solution as many dentists (who want to sell you implants) will
tell you they are. My friend loves his. I, on the other hand, am
lukewarm towards mine. While they do enable me to chew, whereas I
could not chew before in those areas of my mouth, they cause so much
food to get caught against and under them, they are a total pain in
the a.s every single time I eat anything. Yet the opinions have been
that there is nothing wrong with my implants, "That is just the way
they are sometimes".

So, I like to advise people that an implant - especially an implant
bridge - may not be that much better than a regular bridge, in some
ways. So weigh the decision carefully before deciding on implants
especially if money is an issue and you aren't a big fan of long,
(potentially) painful dental sessions and waiting a year or more with
lots of appointments, before getting a tooth or teeth in there.

That said, I would probably do it again if I had to decide again,
because in my case, I had nothing to bridge to (no back tooth to butt
a bridge against) so an implant bridge was my only option and I needed
3 teeth there.

My one implant on the other side, though, I'm not so sure about. Maybe
that one could have been handled just as well with a regular bridge.

The upper 2 I will be getting crowned in a couple months are the same
as the lower bridge: I have nothing there to bridge to, so an implant
bridge is my only good option.

It's been 20 years since Straumann came to USA and at least 5 years
before that, that Niznick was doing his Core-Vent thing and Branemark
had their product on the market for lower over dentures. In dental
school 1975-1980, and in 1 yr AEGD, implants were considered a very
dangerous thing, and anyone placing them was for sure going to end up
facing lawsuits for disfiguring patients and creating great harm. So
far, technology of implant surfaces has evolved and the doomsday
predictions have not arrived. The only problems I see on a daily basis
with implants are a financial one and challenges to place implants in
areas that have been bone resorbed/damaged through tooth
extraction/periodontal bone loss.

Now we see the original Branemark/Niznik protocol pretty much abandoned
with trans-mucosal one stage placement and early loading providing
predictable outcomes. In the early '80s, at Harvard, Paul Schnitmann
routinely buried 5 Core Vent fixtures in the lower anterior mandible,
with the thought that if 2 proceeded to integtrate, he could still
restore the case. And, the manufacturerers, at least Straumann and
Nobel, will replace every implant that fails (or drops on the floor!)
because the success rates are so high, and late failures are unusual.
Late failure articles are not common in the literature.

Yes we cannot ethically guarantee a treatment, but with implants and
implant manufacturer backup, we can come pretty close with implants.