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This article explores the ways in which two caregivers leading a pilot project to collaboratively construct a therapeutic education tool for oral cancer drug use, dealt with the effects of the existing medical hierarchy between healthcare professionals and patients. Our focus is on the processes through which the physicianpatient coordination enabled the project leaders to resolve the paradox of producing a symmetrical relationship in a fundamentally asymmetrical context. Our research is based on a qualitative survey consisting of ten interviews and observations during intervention research. We show how the project leaders worked to foster this coordination by selecting users with the appropriate profiles and skills. Through their selection of users and supervision of co-construction workshops, they sought to reduce the asymmetry in the doctor-patient relationship and to bring about change, both in stakeholders’ relationship to knowledge, and in the power relations that have historically been characterized by medical domination. From the project leaders’ point of view, this favoured the emergence of patients as partners and experts, and produced mutual training effects between participants in the construction of the therapeutic education programme.